Nineteen hundred ninety-five proved to be a landmark year in the digital music revolution. It was then that a brilliant German audio technician retooled his digital sound algorithm, that a record industry executive took the helm at a new studio, and that a line worker in a C D manufacturing plant discovered the promise of stealing music. Together, these developments would shape the future of the industry for decades.
Twenty years on, Stephen Witt has written a riveting, meticulously reported account of music’s technical, economic, and cultural “liberation.” How Music Got Free fuses the rigors of investigative journalism, the science of acoustic analysis, and the sensitivities of social criticism, ultimately yielding a highly readable and compelling, if somewhat incomplete, narrative of the advent of cheap and convenient access to digital music.
Witt weaves together three separate tales, each representing a colorful strand in the larger tapestry. First, he examines the technological emergence of the MP3 file, a digital format developed in Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute by audio whiz Karlheinz Brandenburg. His innovative algorithm compressed the zeros and ones on a compact disc by a factor of 12, a reduction necessary for the harddrives, processors, and modem lines available in 1995 but not so restrictive as to degrade musical quality—except to the ears of the most refined audiophiles.
Brandenburg’s group competed against MUSICAM, a more politically connected outfit bankrolled by the Dutch conglomerate Philips, whose own algorithm, nicknamed MP2, required less processing power but compressed data less efficiently. Luckily for Brandenburg, the growth of processor speeds outpaced bandwidth expansion, and his format won the war.
Soon after signing its first deal to livestream National Hockey League games in MP3, the Fraunhofer group expanded its reach, giving away its software but commanding a royalty on every MP3 download—a total now estimated in the billions. Brandenburg and company strongly believed in intellectual property rights—after all, their proprietary technology depended on patent protection—but their innovation unwittingly triggered an avalanche of copyright infringement.
In this regard, Witt next explores the life and times of Doug Morris, a multimillionaire music industry poobah who, as CEO of the Universal Music Group in the late 1990s and early 2000s, presided over the industry’s richest years and struggled with its gravest threat. After an unceremonious dismissal by Time Warner, Morris was hired by Edgar Bronfman Jr. to head a division of what would become UMG, a perch from which he would sign legendary artists across a range of genres, including Tupac, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, Justin Bieber, and Taylor Swift.
But while, by 1999, Morris had revived UMG as the largest studio in the world, and the industry enjoyed its most successful year ever, between 2000 and 2003 C D sales would fall by 30 percent industry-wide. Brandenburg’s MP3 technology had enabled Napster and even more ambitious networks to empower users to swap music files for free. The industry’s response—suing MP3 device makers and college dormitory downloaders alike—provoked public disgust and arguably stoked the copying fire.
Ultimately, Morris attained redemption. After years of technological failures, including Pressplay, UMG’s proto-iTunes, Morris was the first major recording bigwig to ink a deal with iTunes itself in 2003. A few years later, inspired by his teenage grandson, who compulsively watched for free on YouTube the hits his grandfather had invested millions to produce, Morris finally managed to monetize the music video by creating Vevo, which offers viewers access to tens of thousands of free videos—so long as they first watch a 30-second advertisement.
Finally, Witt uncovers the story of Bennie Lydell Glover, an enterprising C D pressing plant worker in western North Carolina, who turned out to be the “patient zero” of music piracy. As a packager at the PolyGram factory, owned by UMG (and therefore an employee of Morris’s), Glover learned at a 1995 party that coworkers were smuggling unreleased C Ds from the plant, and soon began doing the same. Technically adept, he would then upload them to a top secret site where tracks would be disseminated weeks before their official release.
Although the sites Glover supplied did not sell music, instead restricting access to a tiny group of top hackers—and here, Witt’s tour of the techno-savvy “dark web” is fascinating—the songs inevitably leaked to the public and badly eroded album sales, especially for Universal. The FBI eventually caught up with Glover, but not before he had personally uploaded some 2,000 purloined albums, making him, in Witt’s telling, “the greatest music pirate of all time.”
At times, the book falters. Witt briefly mentions but largely neglects the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a measure enacted by Congress in 1998 to ratchet up statutory penalties on file-sharers, the backbone of the industry-backed lawsuits in the early 2000s and the key political angle to the story. The author contends that lawmakers turned a deaf ear to the recording industry when it sought additional protections against digital copyists—“the music industry was not well liked on Capitol Hill,” he writes, and “found itself abandoned by the state”—but just a few years earlier Congress had armed it with the DMCA, a potent weapon it duly deployed with FBI reinforcements.
Witt also gratuitously bashes William J. Bennett, an estimable public servant and moral crusader, for having the temerity to criticize hip-hop’s violent, misogynistic lyrics. Perhaps the author, who admits to illegally downloading 15,000 albums in his late teens and early twenties, isn’t the quintessentially objective narrator of a story of astounding ethical and legal complexity.
While, in the early years, there may have been a certain strained rationalization to unbundling an inefficient and bloated good—the compact disc album, costing $17.99 and stuffed with unmemorable B-sides next to hit singles—that justification, such as it was, dissipated with the emergence of paid, legitimate media like iTunes, which now boasts more than 40 million songs. Still, the author does an admirable job chronicling this transformation, and fairly treats almost all of the characters, their motivations, and perspectives. By uncovering hidden gems like Bennie Lydell Glover, and ably telling their stories, Stephen Witt sheds light on a burning issue that has mostly generated only heat.
Michael M. Rosen is an intellectual property attorney and writer in Israel.
