Review:
In ‘How Music Got Free,’ Stephen Witt Details an Industry Sea Change
The New York Times - June
15, 2015
In Terry Zwigoff’s 2001
film, “Ghost
World,” a teenager, Enid, walks into the room where Seymour keeps his vast
collection of old 78 r.p.m. records and says: “You are, like, the luckiest guy
in the world. I would kill to have stuff like this.”
Seymour, who is much older,
much nerdier and hasn’t had a date in years, responds, “Please, go ahead and
kill me.”
It used to take geek
fortitude and money to build a solid music collection, as well as a temperate
room to store it in. But a big world has grown small, and a shaggy world has
grown cool and metallic to the touch. Enid could already, in 2001, have toted
all those records home on a thumb drive.
Stephen Witt’s nimble new
book, “How Music Got Free,” is the richest explanation to date about how the
arrival of the MP3 upended almost everything about how music is distributed,
consumed and stored. It’s a story you may think you know, but Mr. Witt brings
fresh reporting to bear, and complicates things in terrific ways.
Stephen Witt
He pushes past Napster (Sean Fanning, dorm room, lawsuits) and goes deep on the German audio
engineers who, drawing on decades of research into how the ear works, spent
years developing the MP3 only to almost see it nearly become the Betamax to
another group’s VHS. Along the way, Mr. Witt delivers a tidy primer in the
field of psychoacoustics.
Even better, he has found
the man — a manager at a CD factory in small-town North Carolina — who over
eight years leaked nearly 2,000 albums before their release, including some of
the best-known rap albums of all time. He smuggled most of them out behind an
oversized belt buckle before ripping them and putting them online.
Mr. Witt refers to this
winsome if somewhat hapless manager, Dell Glover, as “the most fearsome digital
pirate of them all.” All Mr. Glover really wanted, the author suggests, was
some extra money to put rims on his car.
(He would later be arrested
for his thefts and, after cooperating with the F.B.I., serve three months in
prison.)
Mr. Glover, who never
graduated from college, is a good movie waiting to happen. It took the author
three years, he says, to gain his trust. Mr. Witt asks, “Dell, why haven’t you
told anybody any of this before.” Mr. Glover replies: “Man, no one ever asked.”
Into these two narratives
Mr. Witt inserts a third, the story of Doug
Morris, who ran the Universal Music Group from 1995 to 2011. At some points
you wonder if Mr. Morris has been introduced just so the author can have sick
fun with him.
The German inventors and
Mr. Glover operate as if they unwittingly have voodoo dolls of this man. Every
time they make an advance, and prick the music industry, there’s a jump to Mr.
Morris for a reaction shot, screaming in his corner office. Fairly or not, he
comes to personify nearly every bad decision the major music labels made,
notably clinging to the CD format for far too long.
But Mr. Witt humanizes him,
and comes to admire his business instincts and survival skills. Few people have
much sympathy for record label guys. But when Mr. Morris finally makes a shrewd
move near the end of this book, securing for labels a plump share of the
advertising income from online videos, you can’t help feeling almost happy for
him.
“How Music Got Free” is Mr. Witt’s first book,
and it has what a music executive might call crossover appeal. That is, it has
the clear writing and brisk reportorial acumen of a Michael Lewis book. You can
safely give a copy to your father who reads Barron’s.
But Mr. Witt also operates
at ground level. He himself “pirated on an industrial scale,” he admits. When
he arrived at college in 1997, he had never heard of an MP3. “By 2005, when I
moved to New York,” he says, “I had collected 1,500 gigabytes of music, nearly
15,000 albums worth.”
He has a talent for summing
up an era, noting how in dorm rooms “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.”
He was drawn to piracy,
partly because it was part of such a vibrant subculture. There’s a lot of
Seymour from “Ghost World” in him. Writing about a pirate music club known as
Oink, he remarks, “The ‘High Fidelity’ types were still concerned with high
fidelity, of course; only now, instead of exchanging angry letters about
phonograph needles in the back pages of Playboy, they flamed one another over
the relative merits of various MP3 bit rates in hundred-page threads on Oink
forums.”
Mr. Witt covers a lot of
terrain in “How Music Got Free” without ever becoming bogged down in one place
for long. He is knowledgeable about intellectual property issues. In finding
his reporting threads, he doesn’t miss the big picture: He gives us a loge seat
to the entire digital music revolution.
He is especially good on
the arrival of iTunes and the iPod. iTunes may have “promised to cleanse the
world of sin,” he writes, by getting consumers to pay for downloads.
Yet “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,” he says. “If music piracy was the
’90s equivalent of experimentation with illegal drugs, then Apple had invented
the vaporizer.”
It’s a bonus that Mr.
Witt’s book is casually witty. I could provide countless examples, but I will
end with one. He explains the commercial rise of country music in the 2000s by
suggesting the technological shortcomings of its audience.
“For the major labels,” he
says, suddenly “the most important sales demographics in music were those who
didn’t know how to share.”
HOW MUSIC GOT FREE
The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of
Piracy
By Stephen Witt
296 pages. Viking. $27.95.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/books/review-in-how-music-got-free-stephen-witt-details-an-industry-sea-change.html?ref=books
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