Author Stephen Witt. Photo by Chad Griffith. Courtesy of Viking Press
With a smile on his face, author Stephen Witt told me that before publishing his first book, "There was no mention anywhere that the only reason the MP3 succeeded
as a technology was because of the greatest wave of copyright infringement and
piracy that the world had ever seen." MP3s are as ubiquitous as music
itself, but have we ever really asked ourselves
how this new technology came to be so universal, or who exactly was
responsible for its pandemic spread, which crippled the music industry at
large?
In Witt's incredible, possibly canonical
How Music Got Free (out now from Viking), the writer traces how the
audio compression technology went from almost dying in a format war with the MP2
(a Betamax vs. VHS type of battle) and tracks down the patient zero of music
piracy and album leaks: a savvy rough rider named Dell Glover, who worked in a
North Carolina CD plant and smuggled out almost every major album released in
the aughts under his oversized belt buckle. Without this one tatted-out guy,
online piracy would have been impossible, MP3s wouldn't have gained an
online user base, and the technology would have likely become just be a blip in
media history.
It's a story that's too bizarre to make up, but needed
to be told. Over the course of 300 brisk, engaging pages, Witt's
book focuses on three eccentric characters—Karlheinz Brandenburg, one of the men
who invented the MP3; Doug Morris, the head honcho of Universal Music; and Glover,
"the
guy who destroyed the music industry to afford to put souped-up rims on his
car,"
in the author's words. The subjects' unique positions within the music
industry offer a succinct vantage into the evolution of how today's
music landscape became the way it is. Forget about Napster and peer-to-peer
exchange networks—these narratives are essential to understanding why people
say the physical album is dead and how we got to a place in culture where
everyone actually
pays for services
like Spotify.
Even if you're not a music geek,
How Music Got Free is one of the most
gripping investigative books of the year—my mind reels at who will play Glover
in the inevitable movie adaptation. As brand-spanking-new streaming platforms
like Apple Music, Google Play, Tidal, and Spotify gear up to destroy one
another in a new type of format war, Witt's book could not have come out at a
better time. The writer and I met in Brooklyn to discuss Robert Ebert's
influence on how he approached writing a historical text, how he got access to
his subjects, and why he's surprisingly optimistic about the future of the music
industry.
VICE: What was the question that you wanted to answer in writing
this book?
Stephen Witt: The
original question was, "How did the MP3 [go] from being this obscure, academic
German software to the pirate format of choice?" And that really happened—someone
showed me an unearthed floppy disk with an e-zine on it that these early
online software pirates used to send through snail mail. In the e-zine, they
talk about how they
might pirate
music with this new technology. My first
idea was to track down the first guy to pirate an MP3 officially. I failed to
do that. But I learned a lot about this underworld of media leakers called the
Scene. I thought,
God, this shit is
fascinating.
Can you tell me about how
you found Dell Glover?
There's a government database called PACER—Public
Access to Court Electronic Records. For a fee, you can download case dockets
for every prosecution that the Department of Justice has ever brought against
anyone. I probably pulled a hundred such cases, just getting names from FBI
press releases and looking for interesting piracy cases. Eventually, I hit Dell
Glover and I was like, fuck, forget the other 99 guys—this guy did more than
the other 99 cases I pulled combined. It's just this one guy
that leaked so much fucking stuff.
I asked myself, "How do I find this guy? How do I talk
to him?"
So I started hunting on Facebook for people that matched his name, his rough
geographic location, and his general demographic situation. I found a guy in
North Carolina, about the right age, ethnicity, who looked like he lived near
the place where all the leaking was happening [at the PolyGram pressing plant].
I sent him a Facebook message saying "I'm a reporter, I'm writing about
this stuff, I think your story's really interesting, give me a call."
I never expected to hear back, but the next day he called me on my cellphone.
There is actually no real digital property, in a physical sense. The limits we decide to put on digital property rights are entirely arbitrary.
How did you convince him to tell you his whole story?
Dell was all phone calls for a while, and I used those
conversations to write my master's thesis at Columbia. Eventually, he
asked to read it, but I didn't want to send it to him because I was
afraid he'd post it on the internet—well, leak it. I told him I'd
come down to Shelby, North Carolina, and read it to him. So I drove down, sat on
his couch, and I read him the entire thing. And he was like, "It's
a great story, but there's a lot you don't know about..."
and then he started talking about the DVD bootlegging ring, his souped-up car, and
everything else. He's not a talkative person, and I was worried it would seem
like I'd
be trying to pry information from him, but I guess I gained his trust after
reading him my master's thesis about him.
Now we're friends, especially after [the book
came out]. At the time, he was a source. You have to be careful; you don't
want to be friends with your source.
I met him in person four
times, I believe, plus plenty of phone calls. I also got a lot of information
from Facebook, photos, and people in his community [who] wrote close to 20 clemency letters for him. I even talked with his mother and father.
Prior to this book, was there any media coverage of Glover
getting arrested or being a major player in the leaking scene? You wrote that
it was included at the bottom of an FBI press release, but was that it?
No. Well, that's the thing. The FBI caught up to him
in '07. They kept it very secret that they had caught him for a
while because they were hoping to use him as an asset to flip against the other
guys in the pirate groups, which they eventually were sort of able to do. They
couldn't
have any court documents related to his name in the public record that somebody
else could find out about for operational security reasons. I think that's
why the FBI covered it up.
But you
still managed to find the patient zero of music leaks...
It was nuts. I don't think I'll ever be able to
do that again. [Laughs]
So you wrote that he's working at a manufacturing plant for
car grills now, but does he have any tech side-hustles? Is he actually removed
from piracy and internet subcultures?
He has a side business, and he doesn't think it's
illegal. He's buying these commodity computers in bulk—like,
piece-of-shit computers from China. They have very limited computing power, but
it's enough to run a home media server. They have Windows installed
on them, he wipes it off, and then puts this home-media-software server on an
open-sourced platform of sorts.
It's all legal. It costs him probably 50
bucks to get one of these computers and he can sell it for $200. Once you have
one, and if you know what you're doing, you can go and find pirate
media streams out in the ether somewhere and get HBO, Netflix, Hulu, whatever
to stream in your house—for free. Dell does not install and doesn't
point you to any specific pirate networks, though. You could use this to
legally subscribe to Netflix, too. He's just selling a computer with some
open-source home-theater software installed on it.
Remember, in the book I called him "the guy who destroyed the music industry
to put rims on his car"? So now he's moving away from those interests,
but he's gotten really into fishing. There's a lake near his
house. I think now he's the guy who's undercutting the
entire entertainment-complex cable companies to buy a pontoon boat. He's
one of my favorite people I've ever met.
Everybody hates [the record-label executives], but they have their own goals and motivations. I became more interested in that perspective than the musicians' perspectives, which you can get pretty much anywhere.
Do you think there might be a parallel version of Dell Glover
in movie pirating or other media?
Probably, but I don't know. Recently, I found something
very interesting, and I haven't figured out who's
doing it.
Mad Men started
leaking—Mad Men has always leaked, but typically
the way TV piracy works is that pirates tape the show via DVR and then rip it.
The last few episodes of
Mad Men to
air were leaked in this ultra high-definition format that exceeds even BluRay
and has to be compressed once distributed by cable companies. So the only way
these pirates were able to get that is they must've had someone
further up the chain at the cable companies or television stations getting production-quality
stuff and leaking that.
You could write a book about the top leakers of every media
format.
Well, that actually was my original idea for this book. I thought
I'd
do video games, TV, movies, pornography, books, fonts, etc.—but
that ended up being like a broad, general history text. But because it would
have been a survey, there's no narrative thrust and you get
bored and it's really repetitive. Actually, a lot of this shit works the
same way. So all you really need to do is describe one guy's
experience and that generalizes to everyone else. Once you know there's
a guy like Dell Glover, the story of some other guy doing the exact same thing
in the DVD plant isn't super different, right? And Glover was a more compelling
character than a lot of these other guys, too.
What do you want readers
to get out of this book?
First of all, I wanted to show that this story and culture
existed. I just wanted to tell a good story, actually. I wanted it to be the
case that when you started reading the book you found it compelling and you
finished it.
That was my real goal.
In terms of a broader, intellectual takeaway I just wanted to
provoke people to think critically about what property rights mean in the
digital era. There is actually no real digital property, in a physical sense.
The limits we decide to put on digital property rights are entirely arbitrary.
Decisions made in the early days of computing gave the users an
enormous amount of freedom to share files without limitations, to communicate
without very many barriers, and to exchange information with almost no
oversight. Now, in some ways, that's a beautiful thing. But it also
enables a lot of very criminal behavior, right? Think about the Silk Road and
child-abuse networks—it can enable very bad behavior. Since 2007, 2008, there's
been a real shift. Before, the goal of the internet was to empower users. I don't
think that's the mentality anymore. Now the user is treated like a
customer from whom value is supposed to be extracted. Today, technologists and
the rights holders work in concert to make that happen. For example, it's
easy to download a torrent application to your desktop and start torrenting,
but it's impossible to run a torrent off your smartphone.
We've given up a lot of rights to a sort of centralized
authority that tells us what we can and can't have on our
phones. Maybe it had to happen that way, but it is a significant limitation on
our freedom. I wanted people to think critically about that. I don't
have the answers. I just knew that a lot of this information had never appeared
anywhere.
Something I was super
curious about in your book was that the perspective of the artists was
excluded. Was this intentional?
I didn't get any artists to weigh in. I did that on purpose.
Artists always get their say. There's no shortage of coverage of
musicians. The goal of the book was to present things from new and different
perspectives that were very unusual and unexpected. So my portrayal of [Sony Music chairman and CEO] Doug
Morris ends up being, essentially, sympathetic. That was the most unusual
decision, because no one fucking likes recorded music-label executives,
especially not the corporate guys like Morris. They're the butt of
every joke; everyone hates them. But they have their own goals and motivations
for the things that they do, and I became more interested in that perspective
than the musicians' perspectives, which you can get pretty much anywhere.
There's no shortage of how the musicians feel or think about
things. Musicians are also always creative types first. They will always be
beholden to songwriting, their talent as producers, or their ability to play.
So, in my opinion, that meant they didn't necessarily fit with the book.
Like books? Watch our interview with author Karl Ove Knausgaard:
You wrote that "unlocking stuff" can create value, like how music pirates filled a vacuum that the industry
would not. Do you think entertainment and tech companies should be copying,
mimicking, or even hiring tech-users like pirates?
You have to understand, the mistakes the recording industry made
in the 90s they would never make them now. Anyone who runs a music company is
thinking 20 years ahead.
It's the thing I said in the book: The
record industry thought of the compact discs as inventory, whereas computer
engineers saw it as an array of inefficiently stored data. Now, if you're
working at a label you're constantly thinking about
distribution, like technological methods of distribution ten or even 20 years down the road. Since 2007 or 2008, the technologists and the labels are
really cooperating with one another. They've learned their
lesson. They're not going to make those same mistakes again.
Technology is oftentimes unpredictable, though. Couldn't
history repeat itself if these companies aren't malleable to any
sea changes?
History can repeat itself here, definitely. But the industry will
never make that mistakes they made in the 90s where they just completely
ignored, and even tried and quash, some new pieces of technology.
They'll absolutely consider any new
technology and they'll try and get ahead of it. And that's
actually what happened with streaming. They were ahead of the pirates on
streaming and they remain so. There aren't any great
ways to stream pirated stuff. Like, Spotify is a superior service to [torrent
archive] What.CD, in my opinion. Also, torrent traffic is decreasing,
particularly as a portion of overall internet traffic. Younger people tend to
be more willing to subscribe to legal services.
Your recent Financial Times article made it very clear that if one label
pulled out of Spotify, it could be disastrous. I could imagine all the labels
switching to Apple Music.
Apple could end up having conglomerate, monopoly power—Spotify
could too. I mean, Apple has already tried to make moves into this market, and
so has Google, and they failed. They're trying harder now, though. They put
their best people on it, I can tell.
Could it be ruled an illegal
monopoly?
The anti-trust guys would have to make that decision. YouTube,
arguably, is in violation of anti-trust, right? It controls something like 95
or 96 percent of the video-hosting market. Similarly, Google's search engine is
also in violation of anti-trust. It deserves to be—it's
the best search engine. And YouTube deserves it; it's the best video-hosting site. But in cooperation, that gives them an enormous amount of power.
Apple is actually not in danger of violating any anti-trust laws. They only
control like 18 or 19 percent of the Smartphone OS market. Android is huge in the rest
of the world, and even in the US it's like 50 percent of the market. So I don't
see that happening.
For more on piracy, read Motherboard's article on the invisible-labor economy behind pirated Japanese comics
How do you imagine your
book aging? Do you think of it as a snapshot of a specific time period, or will
it be applicable and relevant even as technology and culture evolves?
I have an unusual mindset about this. Rogert Ebert once wrote
about a movie called A Separation, which won the foreign language Oscar
a few years back. It's an Iranian movie. His point was that it was a really
detailed examination of Iranian social and political life. It's
not a broad allegory of anything, but because of that, the more specific in
detail it becomes, the more universal it can eventually be.
If my book is just a snapshot of a particular moment in time,
which I hope it is, then people actually will refer back to it precisely for
that reason. They will want to understand what the time was about and what it
was like. If [the book] became too broad, it would portray biases that were inherent
in my culture at the time. It wouldn't actually mean anything. I tried to
make it pretty narrowly focused on this one period in time while thinking, This,
or something like this, will only happen once. So if you want to know what this
interesting time of experimentation with media distribution and technology
looked like, make it as specific as you can to that time because then it has
potential to be a more definitive document of that time.
I should say I don't think I've done that. I don't
think I've
completely succeeded. But the idea was to make it very specific and detailed
about a particular period of time, because that's much more interesting to me than
these hifalutin concepts of "what does it all mean in the end?" There's
not very much of that in the book, actually. When it comes to the moral aspect
of pirating, I want readers to ask if it actually is wrong. I don't
want to tell them.
Streaming is absolutely the future, and I think if the big players do it right, if they get people to pay and subscribe, then it will be cash money.
I wouldn't describe the book as a polemic.
Yeah, it's not a polemic. Polemics date very badly. It's
true, if you read political writing from some other era, you aren't
interested in it the politics. You're mostly interested in how people led
their lives at that time, and what their motivations were. That's
what I really wanted to capture. Weirdly, if it's done very specifically, that can
have a universal appeal later on. You need the characters too. I learned this
all from Ebert.
Have there been any
responses to this book that you've
genuinely shocked or surprised by?
The most interesting response—which I should have predicted, but was
still surprised by—has been that musicians really love it. Every musician I've
talked to has been really into the topic and subject. They always have
something really interesting to say.
Some musicians get really mad and really angry—and people regularly ask me, "How would you feel if someone pirated
your book?" when, in fact, that did happen immediately. It was on
What.CD about 16 or 17 hours before it was officially launched. There were a
hundred seeds for the torrent. I loved it. For me, vicariously, it was
thrilling. I don't think my publisher shared that opinion [laughs].
Other people have joked that they're going to make a photocopy of every
page in my book and make a zine. That's maybe the most extreme response.
Are you optimistic about
the future of the music industry?
[Zero hesitation] Yes, actually I am. Now the technologists and
the rights holders are working together to recapture the profits they have
lost. I'm
paying $120 a year to subscribe to Spotify and that's a lot. The
majority of people who subscribe are under the age of 27. This was a generation
that was never supposed to pay for anything, but they love Spotify, they love
Netflix, they love HBO Go, and it's real cash that they pay. I think
that will continue to grow. Streaming is absolutely the future, and I think if
the big players do it right, if they get people to pay and subscribe, then it
will be cash money. People have proven that you can sell data. For a while it
didn't
look like it was possible, but the contemporary trend in computing, especially
as we move towards centralized servers and cloud computing (and out of
corporate libraries), is that we're going to pay real money for this
technology.
For more on Stephen Witt, visit his website here.
Follow Zach on Twitter.