![]() Towards the end of the ’70s, Atlantic bought Big Tree and Morris soon found himself the head of Atlantic’s hot new offshoot, Atco. An aspiring musician and producer during the ’60s, Morris founded his own label in 1970 named Big Tree Records. ![]() You might even say that, in the world of the music business, it’s difficult to go any higher than Doug Morris. Witt goes high up the corporate ladder for his third perspective. And so he figured out a way to smuggle Eminem and Kanye West CDs out of the warehouse andupload the sound files to other RNS users a good two weeks before the albums’ release dates. After all, Glover had access to some of the most highly anticipated music releases during the ’00s. Despite the fact that he signed a form at Polygram promising that he would never steal any CDs from the packaging floor, this lowly employee felt that there must have been some way around the plant’s tight security. Glover became a very valuable pawn to this community. Through his friend and fellow Polygram employee James Dockery, Glover fell into a highly secretive group of online music leakers known as the RNS. His endless curiosity for computers and software nudged him into some lucrative moonlighting gigs, such as fixing people’s computers and selling bootleg DVDs. ![]() The second chapter introduces the reader to Bennie Lydell “Dell” Glover, a technologically inclined part time CD packager at the Polygram plant in Shelby, North Carolina. One member of the mp3 team was told, by a competitor at a technology convention, that there would never be a portable mp3 player. Without MPEG’s endorsement, a programmer is stuck in their garage, and many of those endorsements are too political in nature. The mp3 also lost to other formats in high profile listening tests, though Brandenburg’s team blames the Motion Picture Expert Group’s (MPEG) tendencies towards favoritism for their lack of progress. A frequent criticism was that the mp3 was too complicated and the mp2, the mp3’s inferior-sounding competitor, boasted a more user friendly format. Many years of listening and tinkering were slow to pay off as Brandenburg and his team watched company after company take a pass on his achievements. If all that mattered was the digital coding, why not make that format as efficient as possible? With some generous funding and a team of musically-sensitive computer scientists, Brandenburg set out to prove that compact discs carried an unnecessarily bulky design. In a way, Witt delves in just a bit before this historical note by outlining Brandenburg’s apprenticeship under Dieter Seitzer, who studied under Eberhard Zwicker, the man responsible for developing “psychoacoustics” into an academic discipline. Witt starts with Karlheinz Brandenburg, the German audio engineer who is largely considered to be the father of the mp3. I had to say “No, it’s pretty good once you get going.” ![]() In at least two instances, I found myself defending the book in the presence of those who judged it by its (metaphoric) cover. Sure, there are definitely things that Witt could have included that he did not, like the fact that They Might Be Giants chose to release Long Tall Weekend in digital form only in 1999, or how Metallica chose to sue Napster, but his narrow focus on the dawn of music piracy and the ripples directly linked to it makes How Music Got Free a very fun book to read. In his book How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, The Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy Stephen Witt traces the activity on three front lines, leapfrogging through the chapters like it was a mystery or espionage novel. Meanwhile, federal officers would be dispatched to sniff out the hackers who were performing the dirtiest work, resulting in years of online shadow chasing. Top level executives of said industry were reluctant to embrace the quickly evolving digital trends. Music bootleggers were rapidly chipping away at a once-profitable industry. The computer scientists were trying to expose the compact disc as an unnecessary medium to a stubborn old guard. Indeed, right around that time, there were digital music battles being waged on numerous fronts. Not long after I first heard of the mp3, NPR ran a story of how this rogue sound file was so high in quality that it was beginning to spook the music industry. Just like author Stephen Witt, I first came across it in college, an environment absolutely ripe for digital file sharing. A majority of the musically-inclined adult world can recall the time when they first heard about a sound file known as the mp3.
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