How Music Got Free

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy is a 2015 non-fiction book by journalist Stephen Witt. The book unearths the lesser-known history of music piracy, moving past the famous story of Napster to chronicle the invention of the MP3 format, the online “warez” scene which pushed piracy, and the efforts of music-industry moguls to adapt to the new world. Witt also tracks down piracy’s “Patient Zero,” a CD-factory worker who stole and leaked hundreds of records before their official release. The book was published under several alternative titles: How Music Got Free: What Happens When an Entire Generation Commits the Same Crime?, How Music Got Free: The Inventor, The Mogul, and the Thief, and How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention. The New York Times described Witt’s book as “the richest explanation to date about how the arrival of the mp3 upended almost everything about how music is distributed, consumed, and stored.”

For Witt, the story of music piracy begins with the development of the mp3 format. He tells the story of the German engineers—most prominently Karlheinz Brandenburg, Bernhard Grill, and Harald Popp—who drew on decades of research into psychoacoustics and the structure of the human engineer in order to develop a workable compression format for audio files. It takes years of research, but it is also a race against time, with another team of engineers developing a rival format.

The team presents its findings to the Fraunhofer Society (Germany’s premier research organization for applied science): they have developed a technology that can provide the fidelity of a CD recording at one-twelfth of the file size. “Do you realize what you’ve done?” asks someone in the audience. “You’ve killed the music industry!”



Witt proceeds to chart how this prediction came true: "On websites and underground file servers across the world," Witt writes, "the number of mp3 files in existence grew by several orders of magnitude. In dorm rooms everywhere incoming college freshmen found their hard drives filled to capacity with pirated mp3s.” He speaks from experience: “I pirated on an industrial scale.” When he started college, Witt had never heard of mp3s. “By 2005, when I moved to New York, I had collected 1,500 gigabytes of music, nearly 15,000 albums worth.”

Witt suggests that most music pirates were motivated by nothing more than the thrill of finding and categorizing the material of their collections. However, he also notes that he, like many others, was drawn to the vibrant subculture of music piracy, with its nerdy arguments about fidelity on online forums. He compares 1990s piracy to the drug culture of the late 1960s: “Music piracy became to the late ’90s what drug experimentation was to the late ’60s: a generation-wide flouting of both social norms and the existing body of law, with little thought of consequences.”

In particular, Witt focuses on the “warez scene,” also known simply as “The Scene”: an informal collective of hackers and pirates who competed to be the first to release copyrighted material to the public. One of the groups that made up The Scene, known as “Rabid Neurosis,” released thousands of major records weeks or months before their release dates.



Witt investigates how Rabid Neurosis was able to pirate so much highly protected music, tracking down a factory worker in North Carolina, Dell Glover. In the 1990s, Glover realized that he could get his hands on anticipated albums long before their release dates and that Rabid Neurosis would pay him for them. Witt learns that Glover leaked almost 2000 albums over eight years, including albums from artists such as Jay Z, Kanye West, Eminem, Mariah Carey, and Mary J. Blige. He smuggled the CDs out of the factory behind an oversized belt buckle.

Witt argues that Glover and Rabid Neurosis were the premier music pirates of the 2000s, hugely accelerating the problems of the mainstream music industry, who may have lost in the millions of dollars as a result of their actions.

All Glover wanted, Witt remarks, was money for some rims for his car. Glover was eventually caught. He cooperated with the FBI and served three months in jail. Witt tells us that it took him three years to earn Glover’s trust. When Witt asks him, “Dell, why haven’t you told anybody any of this before?” Glover replies: “Man, no one ever asked.”



Alongside the story of Glover and Rabid Neurosis, Witt follows the story of their principle antagonist, Doug Morris, the head of Universal Music from 1995 to 2011. Witt shows how Morris was left helpless as decision after decision went awry. He demonstrates conclusively that the music industry’s biggest error was hanging onto the CD format for too long. Witt finds Morris a happy ending, however, when the executive manages to secure record labels a healthy share of the revenue from advertising alongside online music videos.

Witt concludes by examining the rise of legal streaming, about whose legality he is somewhat dubious: iTunes, he writes “promised to cleanse the world of sin” by persuading listeners to pay for their music, but “Apple’s rise to market dominance in the 2000s relied, at least initially, on acting almost like a money launderer for the spoils of Napster. If music piracy was the ’90s equivalent of experimentation with illegal drugs, then Apple had invented the vaporizer.”