Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.14 AVERAGE
4.14 AVERAGE
A very interesting read. The story of the Mp3 and copyright pirates. Did you know that Mp3 was a German Invention? Did you know that even though it was much better (smaller files, better quality) than the Mp2, the powers that be in the standards agency kept kicking it down, till it looked doomed. As we all know it prevailed. Did you also know that the AAC format was invented by the same people and as supposed to replace the Mp3 as again it was a smaller file size for better quality, but by then the Pirates and made Mp3 the format off choice. So Apple use AAC on it's products and almost all of use have a mixture of both types of file. We find out just how these guys released albums weeks before the official date, how various 'scene' groups competed to be the first to release. And then we hear how the authorities tried to fight back and laregly failed.
How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy was published in 2015, and I was a little worried that being three years old would already render it obsolete. Fortunately, I was wrong. Stephen Witt’s explanation of the rise of mp3 and the transition from CDs to digital stores to streaming, along with the corresponding piracy, is clear and detailed and incredibly fascinating. This is the type of non-fiction I like: full of facts and figures, but organized in such a way that it tells a compelling story while you’re reading.
Witt starts off in the late eighties and early nineties. He essentially tells two parallel tales: Karlheinz Brandenburg’s team at Fraunhofer invents and perfects the mp3, while Dell Glover works at a CD printing plant in North Carolina, where he becomes the leading source of pirated music. Along the way, we also spend time with Doug Morris, a prominent record executive, and various pirate groups and the law enforcement officers trying to shut them down. That might sound scattered, but Witt manages to bring everything together into a coherent and unified look a the the past thirty years of the music industry.
I’m a little younger than Witt. His introduction places him in college in 1997, cramming a 2 GB hard drive full of pirated tunes. I turned 8 in 1997, and I wasn’t much into music at that point. In fact, I was a very late bloomer when it came to forming personal musical tastes and beginning to collect my own music—I think I was well into high school, by which time the iTunes Store was well established. Although I did buy or receive many CDs (mostly movie soundtracks and classical stuff) around that age, my first real experience with collecting music was already digital. I never much got into pirating—I missed that golden age, coming in just after Napster when everything had fragmented and you had to try your luck with torrents and Kazaa or Limewire. I had no trouble getting iTunes Store gift cards for my birthday or Christmas and spending those on $0.99 tracks and $9.99 albums; I chafed at the DRM, for sure, and celebrated when Apple did away with it. Since then, I’ve moved on to another storefront, 7digital, mostly because I try to avoid using iTunes itself these days. I haven’t subscribed to any streaming services—I like to own my music, even if it does exist as lossy bits on a hard drive.
I love how Witt balances the social history with a technical explanation of the workings of the mp3 format. As a mathematician, I’m fascinated by the information-theoretical underpinnings of the mp3. Witt goes into a lot of detail regarding the experiments that Brandenburg’s team did to tailor the mp3’s compression algorithm to best store the components of audio that human ears can detect. In particular, we learn a lot about the struggle to capture in the best fidelity the “lone speaker”. Alongside this technical overview comes the chronicle of the mp3 repeatedly facing rejection from MPEG as a new standard. I never knew that it basically lost out to mp2 as the format of choice—at least until some fateful twists and turns made it into the number one format for streaming pirated music, and then … well, the rest is history and the mp3 is here to stay.
By the same token, Witt provides more detail about the history of music piracy than I ever knew. Obviously early pirated music had to come from CDs, but I didn’t know they were being smuggled so brazenly out of the manufacturing plants. And I didn’t know the nature of the underground community, the way there were l33t groups who took pride in orchestrating and coordinating a release of a pirated album ahead of its actual release date. I really enjoy learning about these kinds of subcultures that existed in the earlier eras of the Internet but have now morphed or disappeared. The Internet has moved so fast in the past ten years that it’s easy, especially for us young’uns, to forget there have been entire movements that sprang up and died off prior to that time.
I also like how we have a very nuanced portrait of the music industry. It’s easy, in my opinion, to be sympathetic to pirates and artists both, and to have a bit of a one-dimensional view of the music executives. Yet Witt emphasizes how, for better or worse, there was a symbiotic ecosystem happening among artists, executives, and consumers. And as the technology changed, of course the industry changed—but why it changed the way it did is so incredibly fascinating.
And then there’s Dell Glover. He grows and matures over the decade he pirates music. He starts as a risk-taking, cool car–driving bootlegger and turns into a more responsible father who decides he no longer wants the heat associated with pirating. It’s interesting to see Witt recount the details of Glover’s involvement in what was quite literally this international operation to leak new releases.
There are a few aspects of How Music Got Free I didn’t like, mostly to do with Witt’s writing. At times, some of the analogies he uses felt dated or awkward or just in bad taste, like when he compares something to an alcoholic who can’t avoid the bottle or something along those lines (it has been over a week since I finished the book, so my memory has already blurred). I just remember thinking, “Um, that wasn’t necessary, where is your editor, young man?” At other points, Witt either introduces or fails to introduce concepts, technologies, parts of history, etc., that don’t need or definitely need, respectively, that introduction. Just some odd editing choices overall.
None of that dampens my enthusiasm for this book, though. It’s a lovely little history of a particular part of the music industry, the era that was the jump from physical to digital media, and some of the internecine conflicts among artists and executives and fans and audience alike. How Music Got Free lives up to the expectations set by its bombastic title, and I learned a great deal from this relatively short non-fiction read!
Witt starts off in the late eighties and early nineties. He essentially tells two parallel tales: Karlheinz Brandenburg’s team at Fraunhofer invents and perfects the mp3, while Dell Glover works at a CD printing plant in North Carolina, where he becomes the leading source of pirated music. Along the way, we also spend time with Doug Morris, a prominent record executive, and various pirate groups and the law enforcement officers trying to shut them down. That might sound scattered, but Witt manages to bring everything together into a coherent and unified look a the the past thirty years of the music industry.
I’m a little younger than Witt. His introduction places him in college in 1997, cramming a 2 GB hard drive full of pirated tunes. I turned 8 in 1997, and I wasn’t much into music at that point. In fact, I was a very late bloomer when it came to forming personal musical tastes and beginning to collect my own music—I think I was well into high school, by which time the iTunes Store was well established. Although I did buy or receive many CDs (mostly movie soundtracks and classical stuff) around that age, my first real experience with collecting music was already digital. I never much got into pirating—I missed that golden age, coming in just after Napster when everything had fragmented and you had to try your luck with torrents and Kazaa or Limewire. I had no trouble getting iTunes Store gift cards for my birthday or Christmas and spending those on $0.99 tracks and $9.99 albums; I chafed at the DRM, for sure, and celebrated when Apple did away with it. Since then, I’ve moved on to another storefront, 7digital, mostly because I try to avoid using iTunes itself these days. I haven’t subscribed to any streaming services—I like to own my music, even if it does exist as lossy bits on a hard drive.
I love how Witt balances the social history with a technical explanation of the workings of the mp3 format. As a mathematician, I’m fascinated by the information-theoretical underpinnings of the mp3. Witt goes into a lot of detail regarding the experiments that Brandenburg’s team did to tailor the mp3’s compression algorithm to best store the components of audio that human ears can detect. In particular, we learn a lot about the struggle to capture in the best fidelity the “lone speaker”. Alongside this technical overview comes the chronicle of the mp3 repeatedly facing rejection from MPEG as a new standard. I never knew that it basically lost out to mp2 as the format of choice—at least until some fateful twists and turns made it into the number one format for streaming pirated music, and then … well, the rest is history and the mp3 is here to stay.
By the same token, Witt provides more detail about the history of music piracy than I ever knew. Obviously early pirated music had to come from CDs, but I didn’t know they were being smuggled so brazenly out of the manufacturing plants. And I didn’t know the nature of the underground community, the way there were l33t groups who took pride in orchestrating and coordinating a release of a pirated album ahead of its actual release date. I really enjoy learning about these kinds of subcultures that existed in the earlier eras of the Internet but have now morphed or disappeared. The Internet has moved so fast in the past ten years that it’s easy, especially for us young’uns, to forget there have been entire movements that sprang up and died off prior to that time.
I also like how we have a very nuanced portrait of the music industry. It’s easy, in my opinion, to be sympathetic to pirates and artists both, and to have a bit of a one-dimensional view of the music executives. Yet Witt emphasizes how, for better or worse, there was a symbiotic ecosystem happening among artists, executives, and consumers. And as the technology changed, of course the industry changed—but why it changed the way it did is so incredibly fascinating.
And then there’s Dell Glover. He grows and matures over the decade he pirates music. He starts as a risk-taking, cool car–driving bootlegger and turns into a more responsible father who decides he no longer wants the heat associated with pirating. It’s interesting to see Witt recount the details of Glover’s involvement in what was quite literally this international operation to leak new releases.
There are a few aspects of How Music Got Free I didn’t like, mostly to do with Witt’s writing. At times, some of the analogies he uses felt dated or awkward or just in bad taste, like when he compares something to an alcoholic who can’t avoid the bottle or something along those lines (it has been over a week since I finished the book, so my memory has already blurred). I just remember thinking, “Um, that wasn’t necessary, where is your editor, young man?” At other points, Witt either introduces or fails to introduce concepts, technologies, parts of history, etc., that don’t need or definitely need, respectively, that introduction. Just some odd editing choices overall.
None of that dampens my enthusiasm for this book, though. It’s a lovely little history of a particular part of the music industry, the era that was the jump from physical to digital media, and some of the internecine conflicts among artists and executives and fans and audience alike. How Music Got Free lives up to the expectations set by its bombastic title, and I learned a great deal from this relatively short non-fiction read!
Lately, I've been having the novel experience of reading about history I remember. I remember the events of this book -- I remember my own perspective, as a very minor I-hate-the-music-industry downloader, of basically everything that happens in this book after the invention of the mp3. This is a fascinating parallax view of history, and I absolutely recommend this for anyone who remembers the heyday of music piracy.
I recommend it for people who don't remember that, too, if they're interested in either how we ended up with the music industry the way it is, or massive, total failures to adapt. This book covers both those topics in ample, fascinating detail, and I learned a lot of things I had absolutely no clue about at when they were happening. A small sample of the things I learned from this book:
1. The NHL was at the forefront of the mp3 revolution. Without hockey, we might not be using mp3s today.
2. I should not have disliked Hilary Rosen as much as I did in 2000; she was the dove arguing behind the scenes for making peace with electronic music and pirates.
3. Most pirated music files can be traced back to one of a limited number of groups of rippers; my image of the early days of piracy, which was random people uploading their music collections and downloading other people's, was almost totally incorrect.
4. Metallica's "Until It Sleeps" was the first "officially" pirated song, which seems especially just considering their hysterical opposition to piracy years later.
The book is also -- well, somewhat quirky. Normally non-fiction lives or dies on its narrative voice, and to be honest, Witt doesn't have much of one. Instead, he has weird moments of personal bias. These can be funny, like his truly massive hateboner for Linkin Park, which was so extreme that in reaction I found myself nostalgically wanting to listen to them for the first time since I lived down the street from -- this is true -- a Linkin Park cover garage band made up of teenagers who were just learning to play their instruments. (Three years of that, and yet I hate Linkin Park less than Witt.) But his bias is also unfortunately visible when it comes to describing the life of Dell Glover, the main CD leaker -- like, Witt at one point says Glover, who is black, was born after the era of discrimination. He is, uh, definitely wrong about that, since babies born tomorrow will still be born in the era of discrimination. In general, Witt has a very easy time relating to people who are pretty much like him, and flounders a lot when he's asked to empathize with or understand people who aren't. And his style is clear but not exactly exciting.
However, the story he's telling -- that is exciting. It's interesting watching an entire industry engage in what might best be termed malignant denial. It's interesting learning who got rich off the piracy era and who didn't. It's interesting finding out what happens when pirates grow up.
Basically, it's interesting to learn more about how music got free.
I recommend it for people who don't remember that, too, if they're interested in either how we ended up with the music industry the way it is, or massive, total failures to adapt. This book covers both those topics in ample, fascinating detail, and I learned a lot of things I had absolutely no clue about at when they were happening. A small sample of the things I learned from this book:
1. The NHL was at the forefront of the mp3 revolution. Without hockey, we might not be using mp3s today.
2. I should not have disliked Hilary Rosen as much as I did in 2000; she was the dove arguing behind the scenes for making peace with electronic music and pirates.
3. Most pirated music files can be traced back to one of a limited number of groups of rippers; my image of the early days of piracy, which was random people uploading their music collections and downloading other people's, was almost totally incorrect.
4. Metallica's "Until It Sleeps" was the first "officially" pirated song, which seems especially just considering their hysterical opposition to piracy years later.
The book is also -- well, somewhat quirky. Normally non-fiction lives or dies on its narrative voice, and to be honest, Witt doesn't have much of one. Instead, he has weird moments of personal bias. These can be funny, like his truly massive hateboner for Linkin Park, which was so extreme that in reaction I found myself nostalgically wanting to listen to them for the first time since I lived down the street from -- this is true -- a Linkin Park cover garage band made up of teenagers who were just learning to play their instruments. (Three years of that, and yet I hate Linkin Park less than Witt.) But his bias is also unfortunately visible when it comes to describing the life of Dell Glover, the main CD leaker -- like, Witt at one point says Glover, who is black, was born after the era of discrimination. He is, uh, definitely wrong about that, since babies born tomorrow will still be born in the era of discrimination. In general, Witt has a very easy time relating to people who are pretty much like him, and flounders a lot when he's asked to empathize with or understand people who aren't. And his style is clear but not exactly exciting.
However, the story he's telling -- that is exciting. It's interesting watching an entire industry engage in what might best be termed malignant denial. It's interesting learning who got rich off the piracy era and who didn't. It's interesting finding out what happens when pirates grow up.
Basically, it's interesting to learn more about how music got free.
I put this book on my to read list on a whim when I was looking for more nonfiction to read. I also put a hold on it on Overdrive when looking for my next book to read on sort of a whim. All this to say when I got the book I wasn't particularly excited about it. I was was worried it was going to be overly technical and boring. This was not the case and I ended up really enjoying the book.
It tells the story of music piracy through the separate stories of three key players: Karlheinz Brandenburg and his team, creators of the mp3, Dell Glover, a North Carolina CD processing plant employees who was responsible for a large share of the pirated material during his active years, and Doug Morris, a recording industry executive who for most of the book is head of Universal Music Group.
The story was told through alternating chapters focusing on each of the lead players (though Brandenburg is phased out as the story of the part he played grows smaller and is replaced with the story of other music pirates.) It was both an interesting and aggravating way of writing. It built a lot of suspense but I was often left disappointed as a new chapter dropped the story just as it was getting good.
It tells the story of music piracy through the separate stories of three key players: Karlheinz Brandenburg and his team, creators of the mp3, Dell Glover, a North Carolina CD processing plant employees who was responsible for a large share of the pirated material during his active years, and Doug Morris, a recording industry executive who for most of the book is head of Universal Music Group.
The story was told through alternating chapters focusing on each of the lead players (though Brandenburg is phased out as the story of the part he played grows smaller and is replaced with the story of other music pirates.) It was both an interesting and aggravating way of writing. It built a lot of suspense but I was often left disappointed as a new chapter dropped the story just as it was getting good.