VIKING

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Copyright © 2015 by Stephen Richard Witt

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Witt, Stephen.

How music got free : the end of an industry, the turn of the century, and

the patient zero of piracy / Stephen Witt.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-698-15252-6

1. Sound recording industry. 2. Music and the Internet.

3. Sound recordings—Pirated editions.

4. MP3 (Audio coding standard)—History. I. Title.

ML3790.W59 2015

381'.45780266—dc23 2015010568

Version_1

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A NOTE ON SOURCES

NOTES

INDEX

To Leonard and Diana,

my loving parents

INTRODUCTION

I am a member of the pirate generation. When I arrived at college in 1997, I had never heard of an mp3. By the end of my first term I had filled my 2-gigabyte hard drive with hundreds of bootlegged songs. By graduation, I had six 20-gigabyte drives, all full. By 2005, when I moved to New York, I had collected 1,500 gigabytes of music, nearly 15,000 albums worth. It took an hour just to queue up my library, and if you ordered the songs alphabetically by artist, you’d have to listen for a year and a half to get from ABBA to ZZ Top.

I pirated on an industrial scale, but told no one. It was an easy secret to keep. You never saw me at the record store and I didn’t DJ parties. The files were procured in chat channels, and through Napster and BitTorrent; I haven’t purchased an album with my own money since the turn of the millennium. The vinyl collectors of old had filled whole basements with dusty album jackets, but my digital collection could fit in a shoebox.

Most of this music I never listened to. I actually hated ABBA, and although I owned four ZZ Top albums, I couldn’t tell you the name of one. What was really driving me, I wonder? Curiosity played a role, but now, years later, I can see that what I really wanted was to belong to an elite and rarefied group. This was not a conscious impulse, and, had you suggested it to me, I would have denied it. But that was the perverse lure of the piracy underground, the point that almost everyone missed. It wasn’t just a way to get the music; it was its own subculture.

I was at the very forefront of the digital download trend. Had I been just a couple of years older, I doubt I would have become so involved. My older friends regarded piracy with skepticism, and sometimes outright hostility. This was true even for those who loved music—in fact, it was especially true for them. Record collecting had been a subculture too, and, for that vanishing breed, finding albums proved to be an exhilarating challenge, one that involved scouring garage sales, sifting through bargain bins, joining mailing lists for bands, and Tuesday visits to the record store. But for me, and those younger, collecting was effortless: the music was simply there. The only hard part was figuring out what to listen to.

As I was browsing through my enormous list of albums one day a few years ago, a fundamental question struck me: where had all this music come from, anyway? I didn’t know the answer, and as I researched it, I realized that no one else did either. There had been heavy coverage of the mp3 phenomenon, of course, and of Apple and Napster and the Pirate Bay, but there had been little talk of the inventors, and almost none at all of those who actually pirated the files.

I became obsessed, and as I researched more, I began to find the most wonderful things. I found the manifesto from the original mp3 piracy clique, a document so old I needed an MS-DOS emulator just to view it. I found the cracked shareware demo for the original mp3 encoder, which even its inventors had considered lost. I found a secret database that tracked thirty years of leaks—software, music, movies—from every major piracy crew, dating back to 1982. I found secret websites in Micronesia and the Congo, registered to shell corporations in Panama, the true proprietors being anyone’s guess. Buried in thousands of pages of court documents, I found wiretap transcripts and FBI surveillance logs and testimony from collaborators in which the details of insidious global conspiracies had been laid bare.

My assumption had been that music piracy was a crowdsourced phenomenon. That is, I believed the mp3s I’d downloaded had been sourced from scattered uploaders around the globe and that this diffuse network of rippers was not organized in any meaningful way. This assumption was wrong. While some of the files were indeed untraceable artifacts from random denizens of the Internet, the vast majority of pirated mp3s came from just a few organized releasing groups. By using forensic data analysis, it was often possible to trace those mp3s back to their place of primary origination. Combining the technical approach with classic investigative reporting, I found I could narrow this down even further. Many times it was possible not just to track the pirated file back to a general origin, but actually to a specific time and a specific person.

That was the real secret, of course: the Internet was made of people. Piracy was a social phenomenon, and once you knew where to look, you could begin to make out individuals in the crowd. Engineers, executives, employees, investigators, convicts, even burnouts—they all played a role.

I started in Germany, where a team of ignored inventors, in a blithe attempt to make a few thousand bucks from a struggling business venture, had accidently crippled a global industry. In so doing, they became extremely wealthy. In interviews, these men dissembled, and attempted to distance themselves from the chaos they had unleashed. Occasionally, they were even disingenuous, but it was impossible to begrudge them their success. After cloistering themselves for years in a listening lab, they had emerged with a technology that would conquer the world.