Kitty Empire talks to Stephen Witt about his eagerly awaited book charting the rise of the MP3 file, the online pirates who exploited it and the record industry that ignored its cultural impact until it was far too late

How Music Got Free is in essence the gripping tale of three men: Karlheinz Brandenburg, the German scientist whose lab cobbled together the MP3; Doug Morris, the old-school record company executive who presided over the rap boom and began the fight-back against piracy; and Bennie Lydell “Dell” Glover, the North Carolina CD pressing plant worker, whose light fingers and computer skills singlehandedly led to a haemorrhage of A-list rock and hip-hop releases – Eminem, Kanye West, Queens of the Stone Age, Björk – being freely available on the internet two weeks before release.

The three men never met, but Witt reveals how their lives overlapped and irrevocably changed those of anyone who listens to music. Brandenburg’s genius lay in shrinking sound files down so that they could easily be sent over the internet, back when most files were huge and modems still dialled up. Owing to the bitter internecine rivalries within acoustic engineering, no one recognised the scope of Brandenburg’s technology; the inferior MP2 kept winning industry accolades and commercial applications. Universal executive Morris presided over an industry rich from the obscene profits generated by CD sales, until the secretive community of organised filesharers began to gouge huge chunks out of their balance sheets.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eminem at the MTV European Music Awards 2002: his albums were leaked online in the early 00s. Photograph: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc

By day, Dell worked in Universal’s CD pressing plant. By night, he was active in Rabid Neurosis (RNS), the premier illegal filesharing community where members were known to each other only by their online handles – ADEG, St James, Kali. If you were a hip-hop fan in the early 2000s with access to the internet, your pre-release pirated download of Jay-Z’s The Blueprint or Eminem’s The Eminem Show originally came from RNS. And RNS got it from Dell, whose network of smugglers used the lavish, outsize circular belt buckles popular among southern guys to hide the CDs, evading the plant’s stringent security measures. It’s estimated that over a period of 11 years, RNS leaked more than 2,000 albums, of which many came from the North Carolina plant.

How did you start downloading?

SW When I showed up at the University of Chicago in the late 90s, I had a beige box computer with a 2GB hard drive, which is about one 16th the size of my phone now. It weighed 20lbs and had this enormous whirring fan. It had an ethernet connection; I plugged that in in my dorm room. Very quickly I was in these internet relay chat channels, which were raucous and full of awful behaviour, but they also had this new kind of file called an MP3 that I had never heard of before. Organised pirates had essentially cracked this software from a German technology incubator and were using that to create near-CD quality audio files at one 10th the size and sharing them across campus servers. By the end of the year, my 2GB hard drive was full of all kinds of music, but especially all of the up-and-coming rap records.

How did that make you feel?

SW I remember telling my mom about this technology and her just looking at me with total puzzlement. If you go back in the archives of the New York Times, the first mention of the MP3 isn’t until November 1998. I was pirating stuff as early as 1997. You felt you were part of a very secret underground.

With regard to RNS, you explain how their motivation was often the thrill of it, rather than financial gain…

Remember, these were mostly young guys, so the kind of thrill-seeking behaviour that you expect of teenage boys is exactly what they were engaging in. What they were doing was revolutionary, although they probably didn’t think of it that way at the time. A lot of them did talk about the dopamine rush. People would routinely try to quit and then would find themselves unable to. So it does have some sort of addictive properties.

Did you have any moral scruples about it at the time?



No. I had bootleg compact discs, we’d trade tapes. It doesn’t feel like stealing. If I take your CD, I’ve stolen from you. But if I borrow it and make a copy and give it back, the only person I’ve harmed is, theoretically, some third-party rights holder. But if that person is not around, and they can’t really enforce their ability to limit your reproduction rights, is it even a crime? You are harming somebody, but it doesn’t feel that way. It’s arguable you’re not harming somebody.

How did you get from a degree in maths to working for hedge funds, to doing development work in Africa, to the book?



Like many people of my generation with quantitative skills, I got sucked into the financial world. I used statistical strategies to play the stock market and it was fun for a while. Ultimately though, I needed some creative outlet, so in 2007, I finally left. For a couple of years, I worked for an NGO in Africa connecting markets to small famers. At the age of 30, I thought, I’ve always wanted to be a writer, so let’s try it. Originally I thought I would write something about my speciality, the financial industry. Have you read [Michael Lewis’s finance exposé] The Big Short? One of the main guys in that book is a guy called Steve Eisman; I used to work in the same office as him. I‘d always thought: “That guy is such a character, he’d be so great for a book” and the next thing you know, Michael Lewis is writing about him. There had been a fair amount of writing about the internet but nothing really investigative. I saw that there was space to write what was originally conceived as the history of the MP3. Pretty soon I found Dell Glover, and I was like: “Holy shit. This is the guy, this is the patient zero, this is the one guy who did everything.”

Dell leaked virtually every hit US album as the 90s gave way to the 00s. But he wouldn’t have been able to do it without German engineering…

The Germans at the Fraunhofer Society [described in the book as “a massive state-run research organisation”] had invented this MP3 encoder [known as L3enc, to turn sound into smaller, more easily transferable MP3 files]. It was essentially a piece of academic software, not marketed to the public. I became interested in the transfer point when the technology first left Fraunhofer and ended up in the internet underworld. I found a bunch of old documents, including an interview with [arguably the first major digital pirate] NetFraCk, describing in September of 1996 how he was going to use this new MP3 format to start pirating music. That was the first I ever heard about this underground called “the Scene”. It turned out the FBI had gone after these guys many times over the years.

I started pulling case files out of Pacer, an online government database of federal prosecutions. I probably pulled 50-100 of those files, looking for the most interesting stories, and I found Dell. I sent him a Facebook message. I wasn’t even sure it was him! The next day he called me. He was pretty open from the first – I think he knew he had lived through something rather extraordinary and he wanted to tell somebody about it.

Are you still in touch with Dell? How’s he doing?

He currently works at the Freightliner truck manufacturing facility installing the grilles on trucks. I talk to him fairly often. He did get a fair amount of static from the people he worked with at the CD plant after the New Yorker article [an extract from Witt’s book telling the Glover story], saying: “Hey, you cost us our jobs.” Particularly his former bosses hate him now. I think the conspirators in the smuggling ring are saying: “Thanks for not putting our names in.” I know who some of those are, but I left their names out, thinking these guys are factory workers, if I start impugning their names they are going to get fired.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Music industry executive Doug Morris signed Miley Cyrus when he was 73. Photograph: Larry Busacca/Getty Images

You have a grudging respect for Doug Morris, the music industry exec who presided over the years of plenty.

Morris has chutzpah. There is a level at which Morris is exactly what you would expect him to be – a slick, corporate [guy]. But he also is, I believe, a huge music fan. There is no faking his enthusiasm. And he’s good at what he does. It’s extraordinary how many major acts he has shepherded to the market over the years. No one has ever had a career in the music industry like his. When he was 73 at Sony he signed Miley Cyrus. It’s kind of extraordinary. I wanted to get into the way that he thought about things. So much of our cultural production now comes from large corporate concerns that are exclusively driven by profit. I did want to explore a little bit what the effect of that is on our culture.

The story really begins with Karlheinz Brandenburg and his six associates at Fraunhofer, who invented the MP3 and the L3enc encoder and tried to sell it to an industry that didn’t want to know. Brandenburg’s work was based on that of Eberhard Zwicker, the “father of psycho-acoustics”, who figured out that the ear was an imperfect organ whose imperfections could be exploited, which led Brandenburg to slice significant chunks out of sound files. Audiophiles such as Neil Young and Jack White bullishly argue the superiority, or warmth, of analogue sound over digital. Are they just plain wrong?

The thing to remember is that the industry first digitised music in the 80s and people loved it. They loved the compact disc. It drove vinyl almost completely off the map. It was only later that this sort of antiquarian fetishism started up. It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that people wanted to go back to vinyl, in my view, because they liked antiques more than anything to do with actual sound quality. Now it is definitely the case that vinyl sounds different from digital music. But that’s because there are imperfections in vinyl; the “warmth” is actually an artefact of vinyl records, not something that happens in the studio. So if you prefer that sound, it’s fine, but you’re essentially fetishising a flaw. The real question is whether the digital sound of a compact disc is different to that of an MP3. People get really angry about this, it’s unbelievable how mad people get.

This is a story in which many aged between 25 and 50 have participated… is music piracy a crime?

Legally there is no question, it’s illegal. But the question is: morally, is it wrong? And to what extent do you want government and large corporations to limit our ability to reproduce things on the internet? “What rights do we have?” is the real question.

Do you buy your music now?

I pay for Spotify!

How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt is published on 18 June by The Bodley Head (£20). Buy it for £16 here