The meeting began late in the morning. The conference room in Erlangen was small and the working group was large, so Grill and the other nonpresenting members of the team had to wait outside. Brandenburg was optimistic as he took his seat. He distributed bound copies of his fifty-page presentation, then worked through his talking points with quiet precision. The mp3 could encode higher-quality sound with less data, he said. When planning standards, it was important to look to the future, he said. Computer processing speed would catch up with the algorithm, he said. The complexity argument was a myth, he said. Throughout, he referred to the presentation.

When he was done, it was MUSICAM’s turn. They handed out a presentation, too. It was two pages long. Their spiel was equally brief: a slick reminder of the elegant simplicity of the mp2. Then the committee began its discussions.

Brandenburg quickly realized that, despite the subgroup’s official recommendation, the mp3 was guaranteed nothing. Deliberations continued for the next five hours. The talks grew acrimonious, and once again Brandenburg sensed behind-the-scenes machinations of a political nature. An increasingly agitated Grill repeatedly stopped by the conference room, then left to pace the hall with his colleagues. Finally, a representative from Philips took the floor. His argument was concise: two separate radio standards would lead to fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The whole point of standards was that you needed only one. After a subtle dig at the mp3’s processing power requirements, he concluded with a direct plea to the working group’s voting members: “Don’t destabilize the system.” Then the steering committee—in the interests of stability, presumably—voted to abandon the mp3 forever.

This was the end. There was nothing left to hope for. MPEG had barred them from the video disc and the broadcasting committees had kicked them off the airwaves. In head-to-head competitions against the mp2, Fraunhofer was now zero for seven. The mp3 was Betamax.

Bernhard Grill was crushed. He had been working on this technology for the better part of a decade. Standing in the crowded conference room, his back against the wall, he considered challenging the ruling. He was emotional, and he knew that, once he began speaking, he might lose control and unleash an angry harangue, fueled by the pent-up frustration he felt toward this group of know-nothing corporate big shots who’d been stringing him along for years. Instead, he remained quiet.

Typisch Deutsch, after all. Grill’s failure to speak up at this moment would haunt him for years to come. The budget vultures were smelling blood, and he knew that the mp3’s corporate underwriters would now pull the plug. The German state was happy to sponsor a technology with a fighting chance, but now the format war was plainly lost. Grill was stubborn, and determined to go down swinging, but he foresaw tough conversations ahead: the abandonment of a dead-end project, the breakup of the team, the patronizing commiseration over years of work spent for nothing.

Karlheinz Brandenburg, too, was devastated. He had handled the previous losses with equanimity, but this time they’d let him get his hopes up. The Philips delegate hadn’t even made a real argument. He’d just exercised his political muscle, and that was it. The whole experience seemed sadistic, a deliberate attempt to crush his spirits. For years to come, when he talked of this meeting, the nervous smile would fade, his lips would tighten, and a distant look would appear upon his face.

Still, this was engineering, where verified results should by necessity triumph over human sentiment. After the meeting, Brandenburg gathered his team for a brief pep talk, during which—the forced smile having returned—he explained how the “standards” people had simply made a mistake. Again. The team was baffled by this upbeat attitude, but Brandenburg could point to a binder full of engineering data, full of double-blind tests, that consistently showed his technology was better. Political dickering aside, that was all that mattered. Some way, somehow, the mp3 had to win in the end. They just had to find someone to listen.

CHAPTER 2

On a Saturday morning later that same year, 1995, two men commuted to work at the PolyGram compact disc manufacturing plant in Kings Mountain, North Carolina. They traveled in a black Jeep Grand Cherokee four-by-four with heavily tinted windows. The men were both part-timers at the plant, and their weekend gigs supplemented the income they earned from other jobs moving furniture and serving fast food. The passenger’s name was James Anthony Dockery, but everyone called him “Tony.” The driver’s name was Bennie Lydell Glover, but everyone called him “Dell.”

The men had met a few months earlier on the factory floor, where Dockery, a talker, had convinced Glover, a listener, to provide him with a standing ride to work. They both lived in Shelby, a small town of 15,000 people located about twenty minutes to the northwest. Glover was 21 years old. Dockery was 25. Neither man had graduated from college. Both were practicing Baptists. Neither had lived more than a few miles away from the place where he’d been born.

Glover was black, wore a chinstrap beard and a well-manicured fade, and dressed in T-shirts and blue jeans. His physique was wiry and muscular, and the corners of his mouth turned down into a grimace. His heavy eyelids gave his face a look of perpetual indifference, his body language was slow and deliberate, and there was a stillness to his presence that approached torpor. When he spoke, which wasn’t often, he would first take several moments to collect his thoughts. Then his voice emerged, extremely deep and drenched in the syrupy tones of the small-town South, the medium of delivery for a pithy sentence, maybe less.

Dockery was white, with close-cropped sandy blond hair and bulbous, glassy eyes. He was shorter than Glover, and his weight vacillated between merely girthy and positively obese. He was a fast-talking jokester, emotional and volatile, and although he could be quick to anger, he tended to laugh as he cursed you out. He made his opinions available to anyone who would listen, and even to many who would not.

Arriving at the facility, Glover and Dockery turned down the service entrance. The plant itself could not quite be seen from the road—it was tucked away in a “holler,” the regional term for a narrow crinkle in the earth. They crested a ridge in the Cherokee and came down the hill to a sprawling, surprising vista: a factory facility the size of a small airport. The PolyGram plant had 300,000 square feet of floor space, and its parking lot could hold 300 cars. Long-haul trucks were directed around back, where they were loaded with freshly pressed discs for distribution across the Eastern Seaboard. At night the parking lots were floodlit, and at all hours the main building buzzed with the promise of electric machinery. Even so, the plant retained something of the bucolic nature of the surrounding countryside. Its perimeter was abutted by forest, and the parking lots were occasionally invaded by rafters of wild turkeys.

The men found a parking spot, negotiating through hundreds of other cars in the midst of a shift change, and entered the factory by way of the cafeteria. Once inside, they made their way to a checkpoint, where employees were required to show their IDs and check their bags. Only a fixed number of workers could participate in a shift, so each man had to wait for another employee to clock out before he could clock in. As a security precaution, entering and exiting employees were not permitted to make physical contact. Once Glover and Dockery were officially on the books, they entered the factory proper. There, nine production lines, arranged in parallel, stretched hundreds of feet across the floor. Each line employed a dozen workers in a choreographed sequence of high-efficiency manufacturing.