How Music Got Free (7 page)

Brandenburg originally called it “NBC”: Not Backward Compatible. The name was a distinct rebuke to MPEG, a signal that they would not enter any more beauty contests. With time, though, this chippy attitude faded, and Fraunhofer eventually gave the project a less combative name: Advanced Audio Coding (AAC).

Brandenburg enlisted corporate stakeholders into the AAC project from the very start. Sony, AT&T, and Dolby were all given large shares, with the understanding that they would fight as hard for AAC as Philips was fighting for the mp2. Politics or no, the next thing Brandenburg made was going to get used. He directed his team to wrap up their work on the mp3 and focus on AAC instead. A new crop of graduate students was assigned to the project, and once again James Johnston provided support. Meanwhile, Grill was given one final piece of mp3-related work: Brandenburg directed him to make an mp3 player for Windows 95.

He was done within a month. Dubbed WinPlay3, this player also fit on a 3.5-inch floppy disk. As Grill tended to write software for other engineers, his sense of design was poor. WinPlay3 was an ugly, uncustomizable blue-on-gray box, with no ability to make playlists or edit the names of songs, and its user interface unnecessarily mimicked the appearance of a monochrome LCD screen.

The finishing touch was the filenames. Microsoft required all files on Windows 95 to have a three-letter filename appended to
them. This had led to some rather strange naming conventions, like “.jpg”—Joint Photographic Experts Group—and “.gif”—Graphics Interchange Format. Grill, at this point, pushed for the technology to be rebranded. The name “Moving Picture Experts Group, Audio Layer III” could certainly be improved upon, and doing so would also allow Fraunhofer to distance themselves from the politically biased standards committees. But after some discussion the team decided to embrace their heritage and use the filename extension “.mp3”. Steve Church’s promotional work in the United States meant they already had something resembling a brand. Fraunhofer also realized that MUSICAM was encoding files in Windows. They were using the filename “.mp2,” and that meant MPEG had given them an unexpected gift. While the two technologies were bitter rivals that had been developed in parallel, the naming scheme implied that the mp3 was somehow the mp2’s successor—a misconception that worked in Fraunhofer’s favor.

Grill finished the program in July and began distributing it on floppy disk as “crippleware.” WinPlay3 had the capacity to play twenty songs, and then, like a message from the Impossible Missions Force, it self-destructed. If you wanted to continue using it past that point, you were required to send a registration fee to Fraunhofer and wait for them to send you back a serial number. WinPlay3 debuted in August, and Grill waited for the sales to trickle in.

Nothing. After some discussions with Linde, Brandenburg and Grill came to understand the problem. Why would anyone purchase a music player if there was no music to be played on it? Before they could sell an mp3 player, they’d have to generate a critical mass of mp3 files. And, to do that, they’d first have to sell a bunch of encoders. And to do
that
, you’d have to have an mp3 player, which no one was going to make without a bunch of files.

It was a classic catch-22, but Brandenburg wasn’t giving up. What did you do with a locked-out technology? You lowered the price.
In the first, unsuccessful attempts, Brandenburg had tried to charge users $125 per encoding license. By the middle of 1995, in consultation with Linde, this had been lowered to $12.50. By late 1995 it was down to $5. Frozen out by MPEG, Brandenburg still worked relentlessly to push the technology into as many hands as he could.

Watching Brandenburg hustle, Linde began to revise his initial impressions. Brandenburg
wasn’t
just a scientist. Underneath the geeky exterior beat the heart of a cunning business strategist. He was a terrible salesman, to be sure. He generated no excitement in potential customers, and his idea of effective marketing material was a binder full of single-spaced engineering data. But he could think strategically, was comfortable with delegation, and had an excellent understanding of his position in the marketplace. He worked relentlessly, and he had terrific instincts about where new opportunities might be found.

The mp3’s first website went live
in late 1995. In the top left corner, a spiky red starburst shouted,
NEU
!
Below this were a half dozen blue download links on a plain white background in hand-coded hypertext. The links offered versions of the L3Enc mp3 encoder for DOS, Windows, and Linux. Apple was not included—Bernhard Grill found the company’s programming environment cumbersome and their user interface patronizing. With such a small share of the home computer market, he didn’t think building an encoder for Macintosh was worth his time.

The download links on the Fraunhofer page offered L3Enc for sale at the new price point: zero. L3Enc was “shareware,” a freely distributable demonstration program that permitted users unlimited access to the software. Accompanying the application was a small text file from Fraunhofer, encouraging users to share the program with others, and if they liked it, to
please send 85 deutsche marks to Fraunhofer IIS in Erlangen, Germany, payable by mail or fax.

Brandenburg figured this would expose the technology to a wider audience and maybe make some money on the side. Linde was
unconvinced but willing to follow Brandenburg’s lead. Grill was skeptical—practically offended—and felt they’d been reduced to begging. And, initially at least, his skepticism was justified. The shareware encoder was a flop, and very few users faxed in their deutsche marks. Over its lifetime, the downloadable L3Enc demo earned less than five hundred
dollars.

B
y 1996, Dell Glover and Tony Dockery had both secured full-time employment at the PolyGram plant. Though they still worked the shrink-wrapper, the two began to receive training for eventual placement in more skilled positions. The move to permanent also meant higher base pay, limited benefits, and, most important, the possibility of overtime. The base wage was now $11 an hour. Once you worked more than forty hours a week, it increased to $16.50. On most weeks Glover would work more than seventy, clocking six 12-hour days in a row. On the seventh day he rested—but only because plant regulations required him to take a day off. His gross take-home was more than a thousand bucks a week. It was good money for an unskilled laborer with no college education, but it wasn’t enough. There were just so many things to buy.

Glover had a remarkable facility for mental accounting. He didn’t budget or keep records, but tracked his cash flows in a mental ledger. On one side was earnings, where, going all the way back to his days as a dishwasher, he could quickly estimate what he had earned in a given week in a given year. On the other side was living expenses, which contained entries for things like utilities, groceries, and rent. Net those two amounts, and you arrived at Glover’s ultimate bottom line: the cash available for high-end discretionary purchases.

First there was the street bike. Solely relying on his overtime earnings, Glover had purchased a Suzuki 750 racing motorcycle, then tricked it out with aftermarket chrome rims and a nitrous oxide booster kit. He had joined a loose confederation of local street racers
and together they explored the empty expanses of highway that surrounded the town. On Memorial Day weekend each year, he would ride with his crew of racers out to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for Black Bike Week. It was a thrilling hobby—on full throttle with the nitrous kicked in, a Suzuki bike could approach 200 miles an hour.

Then there was the handgun. In spite of its trappings of small-town Southern decency, Shelby was dangerous. The sheriff’s department was kept busy with drug dealers, gang activity, and a continuous barrage of violent domestic disputes. At the age of 15, while standing in his parents’ driveway, Glover himself had been shot at following an altercation over a girl. The shots were errant, but the experience had marked him, and now he felt he had enemies. The gun, a Heckler and Koch .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol, cost more than six hundred dollars, plus further application fees for a license.

Then there was the quad bike. The four-wheel off-road vehicle complemented the street bike perfectly. On the weekends when he wasn’t street racing, he went “mudding” with a racially mixed group of thirty other locals. This was a separate group from the bikers, one with a softer, more countrified edge. They called themselves the Quad Squad.

Then there was the car. He still needed a commuter vehicle for the plant, and there was no way he was going to fit Dockery on the back of a street bike. The Cherokee was nearing 100,000 miles and would soon need to be replaced, presumably by something more stylish. Glover had established a savings account for this purpose. In the meantime, he’d upgraded the stereo with a subwoofer in the trunk.

Finally, there was the computer. Bikes, guns, and cars were durable assets, and Glover always had a general sense of their salvage value. A used computer, by contrast, was a hazardous piece of electronic waste. The machine he’d purchased from Sears in 1989 had become obsolete before he’d even paid it off, and by 1996, in an effort to keep up with evolving technology, he’d upgraded to a new box three separate times.

He added to this with an expensive peripheral purchase. The new generation of compact disc burners were the first ever produced for home consumers. Philips’ first entry into this market had come in early 1996, at a retail price of $649. The same company that employed Glover for industrial-scale manufacturing now provided him with an opportunity for artisanal home production. But a six-hundred-dollar CD burner wasn’t just a discretionary purchase; it was an investment. Glover could use the burner to make clones of the music he already owned, and then resell those clones to his friends. If he was really daring, he could use it to make copies of the unreleased music that was making its way out of the plant.

But leaking CDs from the plant was risky. The technician whose party Glover had attended in 1995 had recently been fired, after anonymous plant employees had reported his ill-starred DJ sets to management. Security at the plant couldn’t prove anything, but they took the allegations seriously and had brought in a polygraph examiner to give the technician a lie detector test. He had failed, and his employment was terminated. Glover had seen other workers lose their jobs as well, including a clueless temp who had left a stolen disc in plain view on the dashboard of his car. In that case, PolyGram had arrested the worker and pressed charges for embezzlement. In repeated meetings with employees, PolyGram made it clear that smuggling hurt everyone, especially the workers. Even so, the discs were making their way out. Glover wasn’t sure how, but at the weekend flea markets he attended, in the parking lots of Shelby and beyond, he could still reliably find leaked albums available many weeks ahead of their release dates.

There were other problems. First of all, the burner was slow, and would take about an hour to make a copy. Second, the demand wasn’t there. Even highly anticipated leaks sold for only about five dollars, not nearly enough to compensate for the risk. But if demand was bad, supply was worse. Glover only had access to what came through the plant, and PolyGram’s upcoming release schedule just wasn’t that
good. The label had a dominant position in adult contemporary, and had signed Bon Jovi and Sting, but that wasn’t going to move product on the streets. The kind of people who bought a knockoff CD from the trunk of a car didn’t want an advance copy of
Ten Summoner’s Tales
. They wanted
The Chronic
, and Glover didn’t have it.

He abandoned the idea. He used the burner to make a few copies of video games, a few CDs here and there, but the scattered sales he made did not recoup his costs. As with everything else, he’d charged the burner to his credit card, and as the financing charges mounted he began to regret the investment.

At least the payments built his credit. To the community he was a roughrider, and to the marketplace a bootlegger, but to the reporting agencies he was a model customer. He had a steady job with a presentable paycheck, and he never missed a payment. He had even talked his mother into cosigning for the bike.

Loretta Glover loved her son dearly. Dell had two older sisters, but he was her firstborn son, and she knew that, despite appearances, he was kind, responsible, and diligent. She saw too that he was interested in technology, and this was something she encouraged. Still, at times she worried about his judgment, and his level of maturity. Glover, now 22, had only just moved out of the house—into a small trailer in the backyard, rented for a nominal amount of money.

Several months later his girlfriend moved in. Glover convinced her, too, to go along with his moneymaking schemes. First, like his father and his father’s father, he opened up a sideline as a tinkerer. Expertise in computing hardware was rare in Shelby, and Glover realized he could charge for it. By mid-1996 Glover was getting five or six repair jobs a week. His trailer became a repository for broken game consoles and computers, and—to his girlfriend’s delight, no doubt—his kitchen table was scattered with tools and disassembled equipment in various states of repair.

In addition to the modest income from fix-it work, he began a dog breeding business. Purebred pit bull puppies were sought after in
Shelby, and a single litter of certified pedigree might bring in over a thousand dollars. Glover bought a high-yielding bitch from another local breeder and contracted for a stud. Within a few months he had dozens of puppies for sale, kept in outdoor pens behind his parents’ house. Glover liked this breed of dog. He liked their musculature, their attitude, and the ferocity of their appearance. He liked them so much that, at the age of 18, he’d gotten a tattoo of the grim reaper holding a snarling pit bull on a chain. He’d followed that up on the opposite arm with a tattoo of a tribal band wrapped around the outline of a heart.

The overall picture was not glamorous. He worked in a factory and lived with his girlfriend in a trailer behind his parents’ house. He kept twenty pit bulls in his yard, and on weekends he alternated between street racing and off-roading. His girlfriend was unhappy, his tattoos were stupid, and he was driving himself into debt. His favorite musical genre was rap, his second favorite was country, and his lifestyle was like a mash-up of the two.

But then there was the Internet—a portal to a different world. It arrived in Glover’s trailer from outer space. In the fall of 1996,
Hughes Network Systems introduced the country’s first consumer-grade satellite broadband, and Dell Glover had signed up almost the first day it was available. The service offered download speeds of up to 400 kilobits per second, nearly ten times the speed of even the best dial-up modem. The old bulletin board systems were being left behind, replaced by the interconnected universe of the World Wide Web.

Tony Dockery was an early adopter too, and together the two friends explored this new digital frontier. Dockery, more intrepid, showed a certain talent for finding the outlandish and the fetishistic, the outré and the bizarre. Glover, a creature of habit, stayed closer to home. In truth, he found the Web of 1996 a little boring. There was no social media, no e-commerce, no video, no Wikipedia. The typical Web page was a half-finished collection of dead links with the words “
UNDER CONSTRUCTION”
plastered across the top in blinking text,
flanked by two animated gifs of flashing police lights. Everything was ugly and hard to navigate. Yahoo!, the Web’s leading search engine, was just an indexed collection of links, presented in
a cluttered blue-on-white color scheme that was about as fun to read as an income tax form.

The real action, they both soon found, was somewhere else: chat rooms. Specifically, Internet Relay Chat, a constellation of privately owned and operated servers that predated the more corporatized channels of the Web by years. Leaving the Web for IRC was like walking out of an air-conditioned mall and into an open-air drug market. You created a user name and joined a channel, indicated by a hash mark: #politics, #sex, #computers, etc. The channels were loosely moderated and not beholden to any centralized authority, and nothing seemed off-limits.

Glover and Dockery became chat addicts, and on some days, even after 14 hours in each other’s company, the two hung out in the same chat channel after work. Except, on IRC, Dockery wasn’t Dockery: he was “Jah Jah,” or sometimes “StJames.” And Glover wasn’t Glover: he was “Darkman” or, more commonly, by playing off his initials, “ADEG.”

The sense of anonymity was exhilarating, although perhaps illusory. In exploring the technology, Glover and Dockery soon learned that it was possible to “ping” other users and trace their Internet Protocol addresses. These IP addresses acted like the PO boxes of old: while you couldn’t know exactly who the person was behind them, you could figure out what Internet provider they used, and get a general sense of geographic location.

There were ways to mask one’s IP address, of course. The technically adept could even spoof their locations, and suddenly appear to be chatting from address blocks in Antarctica or North Korea. But Glover and Dockery didn’t bother with this. Part of the appeal of IRC was the opportunity to interact with strangers from all over the world. Glover did not have a passport and hardly ever left the South.
Even the state of Virginia, a hundred miles to the north, was a distant frontier. But this new technology brought the world to his kitchen and, true to the promise of its breathless evangelists, provided the opportunity to forge new digital communities of friendship and respect, where historical considerations of culture and geography were suddenly obsolesced.

Also, you could share files. Both Glover and Dockery had participated in file-sharing subculture from the bulletin board days, and had passed around floppy disks full of cracked shareware through the postal service. Getting a disk in the mail—or, less commonly, in a hand-to-hand transfer—was like Christmas morning, with royalty-free versions of
Duke Nukem
and
Wing Commander
under the tree. Now, on IRC, every day was Christmas, with a preprogrammed script known as a “bot” playing the role of automated Santa, instantly filling your wish list of cracked files on demand. With satellite download, you could fill your 1-gigabyte hard drive with pirated software in a matter of hours.

The cracked files were known as “warez,” an ironic derivation of “software.” Warez was a singular term; it was also a plural one, and a subculture, and a lifestyle. Soon Glover was spending a lot of time in IRC’s #warez channel—too much time, as he later would admit. Before it became a widespread phenomenon, Glover was addicted to the Internet. In addition to the street bikes and the pit bulls and the Quad Squad, there were now the continuing online adventures of ADEG.

In later years he wouldn’t quite remember exactly when he’d found it. The Internet had a hypnotic effect that seemed to dilate the flow of time. Probably it was late in 1996, or maybe early in 1997, when Glover first heard the good news: not only was there a brisk trade in pirated software, but there existed a growing channel for pirated music as well. This perplexed Glover, who knew from memory that a compact disc held more than 700 megabytes of data. Doing the mental arithmetic, he figured that it would take nearly an hour to download
a CD, and the resulting file would take up more than 70 percent of his computer’s storage. Trading pirated music was a technical possibility, he supposed, but an impractical one.

But Glover was directed to a new IRC channel: #mp3. There, among thousands upon thousands of users, engaged in complex technical chatter and trading profane, often racially charged insults, he found CD music files that had somehow been shrunk to one-twelfth of their original size. Those warez guys, it turned out, didn’t just pirate software. Music, games, magazines, pictures, pornography, fonts—they pirated anything that could be compressed.