By “Tampa” Earl Burton
Everyone loves movies. If it is a movie with a rock and roll soundtrack, then people love it even more. If it is a movie that tells you about a particular subject in rock and roll, or a moment in its history, then I am all over that! Rock documentaries – or “rock docs,” for future references – are plentiful, and here at Rock at Night we are going to start a monthly tribute to those films that look to entertain us about rock and roll while also teaching us about its history. To get it off to a start, how about a look at a recent release in the genre – How Music Got Free, currently airing on Paramount+.
The music industry of today is nowhere near what it was even a scant thirty years ago. Back in those days, the music industry was dominated by record labels, who guarded the releases from their stables of artists and bands with almost a militaristic quality. Yet, in a quick decade, the record labels were reduced to their knees and the industry completely changed to what it is today.
How did this happen? The rock doc How Music Got Free (airing on Paramount+) investigates what basically destroyed the music industry. The documentary, which used the excellent book from author Stephen Witt for its inspiration, has an odd conglomerate of producers, including the NBA’s LeBron James, his agent Maverick Carter, and Marshall Mathers (otherwise known as Eminem), who attempt to tell the story of how the music industry was brought to its knees. Throughout two episodes (roughly 100 actual minutes), we go back in time to the mid-Nineties and the birth of the digital file.
A German computer engineer named Karlheinz Brandenburg and his team at the Fraunhofer Society created a process that would keep the digital quality of a recorded piece, but essentially crush it into a smaller package to allow for more files to be stored on a device. These files were called MP3s, and their creation caused a buzz across the music industry. It also was right in line with another technological innovation, the expansion of high-speed internet access, and the two together would cripple the recording and music worlds.
With no interest in his creation being shown by the music industry, Brandenburg released his program on the internet and several hacker groups, called the ‘warez scene,’ began to see that they could send the MP3 files created by Brandenburg’s program across the internet through the advancements in internet access. What would once take days to load on an old dial-up connection now could be done in hours or, especially for singular songs, minutes, and these ‘warez scene’ participants would take full advantage of both technologies.
Before long, it became a competition among the ‘warez scene’ participants to see who could get the hottest new files onto P2P (peer-to-peer) file-sharing services like Napster, LimeWire, or Kazaa. This brought about some brainstorming by those in the ‘warez scene,’ leading them to realize that they needed to find someone “in the business” who might help them with what they did. They would find that in a man named Dell Glover, a line supervisor at a CD manufacturing plant in North Carolina.
Through smuggling out pressed copies of unreleased CDs, Glover was able to put music from such artists as Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, Eminem, Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Kanye West, and many others out to the public before these albums were officially released. There is a problem with this – that’s called piracy, and it cost the recording industry millions, if not a billion, dollars.
That brought the attention of the federal government and the artists themselves, who sued the file-sharing programs for allowing their unreleased materials to be transferred on their servers. The Metallica/Napster case was a part of this, which resulted in a judgment against Napster that resulted in the bankruptcy of the company and the men running it. The feds traced the leaked materials back to the North Carolina plant and, eventually, Glover, but by that point in the late Aughts, it was too late – the MP3 and file sharing had decimated the recording industry.
There are a couple of things that were remarkable about How Music Got Free. Let’s be honest – anyone between the ages of forty and sixty downloaded their favorite songs from one of the file-sharing services. Rather than pay what was becoming an exorbitant price for CDs at that time, many young people (and young adults) saw the sharing of the files as a way of “sticking it to the Man” and not a big deal. This was evident from the thoughts of some of the people in the doc.
Actual members of the ‘warez scene’ were interviewed for the doc, as were employees at the CD plant (who thought nothing of stealing the music they were printing off) and Glover himself, who admitted he knew it was wrong but that he was bored in his job and life. These people should have known what they were doing was wrong, but many of them just didn’t give a shit – they speak about having lifted boxes of CDs and giving them out as Christmas gifts. The audacity of some of these people is utterly shocking.
The second surprising thing was the general je ne sais quoi of the recording industry regarding what would eventually destroy them. Instead of embracing Brandenburg’s breakthrough and trying to introduce a new way of delivering music to their audiences, they instead ignored the changes in the technological realm and thought that they were impervious to any of this breakthrough tech. This was a remarkable lack of forethought on the part of the recording industry, and they only made it worse by criminally charging the VERY FANS WHO LISTENED TO THEIR MUSIC with piracy (one downloader was hit with a nearly $300,000 judgment after being found guilty of illegal downloading).
It all has a direct impact on today’s music scene. Instead of having record labels that would serve as a funnel for new music, today’s musicians can directly shoot their music out on an array of outlets (Bandcamp, Spotify, Amazon Music, etc.) – for better or for worse. It has led to a return to the Fifties style of listening to music, with the listeners more concerned with singles that they can stack up in a “playlist” (like they would stack 45s in the past) rather than albums with a concise message or entertainment pathway. And it has impacted who gets the money – but instead of the record companies getting the massive paydays, it is the streaming services that garner the big bucks, and not the artists or bands.
In the end, people went to jail (Glover served three months in federal prison), the record industry was decimated, and did anything change? How Music Got Free presents the entirety of the story and, to be honest, there isn’t a likable character in any of the people presented. Thus, it makes it tough to determine who was right and who was wrong – was it the “pirates” who the narrator Method Man calls “pioneers?” Was it those who had their music stolen? Or was it those who tried to stop it? It does present the story, warts and all, very well, and lets the viewer make their own decisions.
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