How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy by Stephen Witt
I got the ebook when I heard an interview with the author on a music podcast I like. The hosts were marveling at how the FBI was seeking out sophisticated cyber pirates, when in fact the music industry was being gulled by a manufacturing plant employee smuggling CD’s behind his belt buckle.
The book starts unexpectedly in Germany where some experts (now extremely wealthy experts) in psychoacoustics were developing the mp3. Through exhaustive and painstaking work they had shrunk and optimized audio files to make them storable even on the slow computers of the day.
The author follows a fascinating small town North Carolina man who smuggled the pre-release CD’s that fed the growing filesharing culture of the late 90’s and early 00’s.
The author portrays the music industry executives as clueless and slow to react to the rapidly changing times. When they finally did react, they went after people like impoverished single mother Jammie Thomas-Rasset, seeking huge punitive awards for sharing fewer than fifty songs.
I enjoy it when a book or article describes a trend in the larger world, and I see events and attitudes in my own life are recapitulated there:
– At the age of 14 I paid $18 for The Slim Shady LP. This was when hip-hop was dominant, quality was not a priority of the music industry, and they could charge whatever they wanted.
– In high school and college I created a vast collection of music through Soulseek and Kazaa. The dorm networks were the key. I honed my tastes, dove deep into music, and found out what I really loved.
– Now, almost twenty years after buying that first CD, I have music on demand through one paid streaming service and a multitude of free ones. I no longer do anything illegal, but I also have no idea how the artists get paid.
The timeline of music in my own life coincides with the changes the book describes. I’d recommend it. Some passages I highlighted:
"Despite all this, 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."
"From a holistic perspective, then, the digital system produced far less waste and gave consumers what they wanted far more quickly. The only problem was that it didn’t make nearly as much money."
"Lobbying from media industries had pushed commercial copyright statutes from their original 14-year terms to protections that could last for hundreds of years. This had diminished the public domain and left the majority of cultural products in the hands of just a few multinational corporations."
"Nullification was the prerogative of juries, while accepting a preponderance of evidence, to override laws they saw as unjust. This was the real reason for Chow’s not guilty verdict, and probably Cassim’s too."
"Not long ago the home audio experience had meant scratched-up vinyl on a cheap turntable, and the mobile experience had meant an AM transistor radio at the beach. The mp3 certainly sounded better than either of those. Most listeners didn’t care about quality, and the obsession with perfect sound forever was an early indicator that the music industry didn’t understand its customers."
pseudoisaac 