Just Finished Reading: How Music Got Free – The Inventor, The Mogul, and The Thief by Stephen Witt (FP: 2015) [276pp]

I remember, just after I got my first Broadband line, that some of my friends had started downloading music from the Internet. Back then downloading anything of any size was a rare thing. I’d downloaded pictures and text but that was about it. The very idea of downloading video or games was fanciful but music…..? I thought I’d give it a try. So I loaded up Kazzaa and started looking for songs. At first it wasn’t exactly fast. But after a while it got so I could download a song faster than I could listen to it. I remember one day walking back from the shops and a car with the top down stopped just in front of me. Being warm the driver was playing loud music to the world and I recognised the song and thought about getting it. Once home I logged on, found the song, and was listening to it in full digital quality less than 5 minutes later. Sweet. But how did that all happen? Until reading this excellent book I had absolutely no idea.

It all started in Germany with a bunch of technicians and Geeks wanting to record and store music digitally. Surprisingly that’s not anywhere near as easy as it sounds (pun intended). It took YEARS and a lot of money (provided by the West German government) to make it work – honestly I’m not a HUGE techno-geek but this bit was fascinating. As one reviewer said it was amazing how you could read something late into the night that had phrases in it like “polyphaser quadrant filter bank”. [Side note: One of my favourite music terms I ‘discovered’ recently is ‘gated-reverb’ of which more later!] Of course once they began recording the music accurately they hit a wall with transmitting it over the crude wires back then so needed to compress the data as much as possible. Eventually they were awarded with a new standard – despite the idea that it wasn’t expected to catch on. You may have heard of it: MP3. True to form the MP3 format wasn’t exactly setting the wires on fire. Only when it was used for sports recording did it really take off and so it might have languished until a group of music enthusiasts got hold of the idea and started compressing music files of their small PC hard drives. But once you had the data you’d want to share it with friends, right? But how to do that?

Enter the computer whiz kids and hackers. Uploading or ‘ripping’ music was reasonably easy especially with the growth of CDs and the spread of software, both legitimate and homebrewed, to enable you to do so. Naturally over time it got easier and faster as expertise improved. Sharing was a bit more complex especially when you wanted multiple people to access the files simultaneously. With Napster and then others (like Kazzaa, the platform I used) those problems began to be resolved. So here we had music lovers buying music and uploading it for friends and anyone else to download it for free. When the numbers were small no one really bothered about it or cared. When the numbers skyrocketed people started to REALLY care – especially the music industry who could no longer afford to ignore widespread music piracy. So they tried to stop it – HARD. Unfortunately for them the genie was well and truly out of the bottle, that stable door was well and truly open with the bolt and both hinges sitting on the floor collecting dust. But it wasn’t really the home users or the private sharers that the industry needed to worry about. It was the big time leakers.

At first no one really thought overly much about security at the CD pressing plants. But these facilities often received the Master CDs weeks and sometimes longer before a new album was released. It wasn’t long before hacker groups started to compete with each other to release an album first and, for extra kudos, as long as possible before the official release date. DJ’s, record stores and distribution centres each had their moles who, either for money or just for the hell of it, gave early release CDs to those willing and able to upload them onto host sites for general distribution. Naturally the holy grail of such exploits was the CD pressing facilities. One group had a mole their too. As you might imagine the record industries top dogs were pulling their hair out trying to stop the leaks – mostly to no avail.

It was really interesting being able to see behind the curtain and discover exactly how music became free and changed the industry forever. Without the many people profiled in this excellent book we definitely wouldn’t have anything like iTunes that’s for certain. If you had any tangential contact with such a world or just have an interest in music or the music industry then this is definitely the book for you. It was a real eye-opener on multiple levels and was written in such a way that it was difficult to put down. Paced like a thriller, complete with FBI raids, sting operations and INTERPOL involvement this is a real page turner. An interesting window into how the modern music industry operates and definitely recommended. More music books to come.