Brandenburg had heard this argument before. In rebuttal, he pointed to Eberhard Zwicker’s theoretical work, which showed that the deleted information was actually inaudible, and to the double-blind tests that empirically confirmed that this was the case. Transparency had always been Brandenburg’s goal, and by 1997 he felt he could achieve it in 99 percent of all cases. But the studio engineers weren’t having it. They remained convinced they could perceive vast differences between CD audio and mp3 audio at any level of quality, and, furthermore, they resented having their professional judgment called into question.
Many prominent artists agreed with this assessment. Some, like Neil Young, would go on to spend years fighting a losing battle to preserve audio quality standards. But this wasn’t a technical disagreement—it was a culture clash. Although they notionally worked in the same field, the studio engineers were a separate breed from the Fraunhofer guys. They tended to have associate degrees in music management, not PhDs in electrical engineering. Many were themselves musicians or songwriters, while others ended up as high-paid record producers. (Jimmy Iovine had started out as one.) In other words, they were artists, and they tended not to see the world in scientific terms. For the studio guys, sound was an aesthetic quality that you described in terms of “tone” and “warmth.” For the researchers, sound was a physical property of the universe that you described in logarithmic units of air displacement. When an acoustic researcher argued with a record producer, the debate wasn’t really conducted in the same language.
And in the end, all the data in the world wouldn’t have conclusively proved Brandenburg’s point. The ear was an anatomical organ, one as distinct as the fingerprint, and each person’s acoustic reality was different. While it seemed unlikely that a studio engineer might hear something that hundreds of trained professionals had missed, it was certainly not impossible. For a while, at least, this argument carried the day.
The RIAA snub was a minor setback for Brandenburg. For the music business, it was a terrible, unforced error. Even if you granted the soundboard jocks the point about audio quality, it wasn’t relevant to sales. 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.
Other industries were smarter. Where the major labels saw degradation, the consumer electronics players saw dollar signs. Around the time of the first RIAA meeting, Diamond Multimedia and Saehan International, both Korean companies, independently approached Fraunhofer with the idea of making the world’s first portable mp3 player. (They were unaware that Harald Popp had commissioned a functioning prototype two years before.) While neither company presented an especially impressive design concept, Henri Linde negotiated the deals quickly, believing that the Japanese consumer electronics majors like Sony and Toshiba would soon follow.
They didn’t come. Once scrappy upstarts, the Japanese majors were now established multinationals who had lost their early appetite for risk. And the mp3 was dangerous: most of the files on the Web were illegal, and hosting them was an invitation to be sued. The electronics industry and the music majors had always had an uneasy relationship, and the introduction of the cassette tape deck in the 1980s had provoked a flurry of lawsuits. Now more cautious, Sony, Toshiba, and the rest of the Japanese leaders watched carefully from the shoreline as the Korean B-team players waded into shark-infested waters.
But one industry loved controversy: the press. After the USA Today article, Fraunhofer’s public relations arm was swamped with interview requests, and the Erlangen campus was overrun by camera crews. Naturally, the journalists wanted to know who was responsible for this technology, and they focused their attention on Brandenburg. He carefully directed it away. Over the next few years, even as the mp3 was widely touted as the audio technology of the future, its inventor preserved a surprising degree of anonymity.
He did this by underplaying his own role. In every interview he gave, Brandenburg denied that the mp3 even had a single inventor, instead stressing the importance of the collaborative effort of his team. (This was usually the first thing out of his mouth.) From there he would start crediting other stakeholders in the project, like Thomson, and AT&T, and, in later years, even MPEG itself. Sometimes he even credited MUSICAM, since it held the patent on the filter bank that Fraunhofer was still forced to license. Meaning that, as the mp3 money began to roll in, even Philips got a tiny cut.
The picture Brandenburg presented to the public was of a large-scale consortium involving a complex thicket of patents and licensing cash flows, a project with a dozen stakeholders and no single driving force. But Henri Linde knew different. As licensing manager, he was one of the few people qualified to actually interpret this mess, and he could see that Brandenburg was obfuscating. It was a phenomenon he termed “escaping to the team.”
It was certainly true that Bernhard Grill, Harald Popp, and the rest of the original six were indispensible, and that Brandenburg had been fortunate to fall in with such a talented crew. It was also true that Thomson had provided critical support, especially in the form of Linde himself. And it was true that the project had many stakeholders—the twenty different patents that covered the full suite of mp3 technology provided revenues to more than two dozen inventors, and that was after the attached institutions took their cut. You had to dive deep into the licensing agreements to learn the secret: Brandenburg earned a far, far larger share of the mp3’s licensing revenue than anybody else. Of all the names that appeared on the patents, Brandenburg’s appeared most often, and, on the first and most important one, filed in 1986, Brandenburg’s name appeared alone.
His personal economic stake in the mp3 project was enormous. This was what he was trying to hide. He was a modest person, uncomfortable with attention, and this was compounded, perhaps, by certain German cultural values that discouraged the flaunting of wealth. Perhaps, too, he was trying to draw attention from an exquisite irony—that his intellectual property fortune was being earned on the back of the most widespread copyright infringement campaign in history.
Others began to notice the commercial potential for the mp3. As with Diamond and Saehan, the early innovators tended to be outsiders who didn’t care much about the established body of intellectual property law. In April 1997, Justin Frankel, a freshman student at the University of Utah, debuted Winamp, an mp3 player that offered several minor cosmetic improvements to WinPlay3, chiefly the ability to edit playlists. Frankel did not bother to license the technology from Fraunhofer, even as he preserved the original sin of Grill’s design by pointlessly aping an LCD monochrome screen. Within a year, Winamp had been downloaded 15 million times. Around that time too, several different companies debuted officially licensed mp3 encoders that improved on L3Enc. Grill’s original mp3 software suite was soon overtaken by these better-designed competitors, and his own programs were retired.
That September, the incoming class of 1997 matriculated, and a generation of adult adolescents now had the limitless capacity to reproduce and share music files, and neither the income nor the inclination to pay. (I was among them.) On websites and underground file servers across the world, the number of mp3 files in existence grew by several orders of magnitude. In dorm rooms everywhere incoming college freshmen found their hard drives filled to capacity with pirated mp3s. The academic institutions themselves were unwitting accomplices, and 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.