Working from journalist Stephen Witt’s 2015 book of the same name, How Music Got Free director Alexandria Stapleton enlists executives and artists from Universal Music to tell the story of, well, how music got free. The results are often fascinating.
Framed as a story of haves and have-nots and narrated by Universal artist Method Man, How Music… functions as a Cliffs Notes of Witt’s narrative (he’s present throughout the film, pushing it along) and really pushes the great-man theory of the beginning of mass file sharing. After Stapleton takes us through the beginning of file compression, we start, more or less, in 1999, the peak year of 15 years of utterly bananas music business profits as music fans replaced their LPs and tapes with CDs, which were cheaper to produce and more expensive to buy (I submit that Stapleton doesn’t actually make enough of this as the music biz’s original sin here but to each their own).
She shows how the late 1990s warez scene started uploading CDs at a furious rate, something that caught the eye of RIAA CEO Hilary Rosen (remember her?). Label heads were pissed off enough by the CDs that were being uploaded after going on sale, but they really started to lose their minds when stuff started appearing on the internet before the street date. How the hell were these (mostly) teenagers getting this stuff so early?
Turns out the weak leak in the security chain was at the manufacturing plant, particularly one in Shelby, NC. A self-taught computer savant and plant employee named Dell Glover started lifting CDs from the plant and uploading them to a warez scene crew called RNS; these crews became the rock upon which peer-to-peer sites such as Napster built their church, and the genie was really out of the bottle. And then there’s Steve Jobs, whose iPod was a perfect way to listen to music that folks were getting off peer-to-peer sites.
The racial algebra of all this becomes complicated fast: Glover and his pals in Shelby were Black, Southern and working-class, making very little money at the plant (as one of the CD smugglers says, “if they wanted me to be good, they would have paid me more”). The warez scene folks were all over the world (in fairness, anonymity was a large part of all of this) and these MP3s were spread largely by middle-class college folks in their dorms.
This was also a point where the pop charts were dominated by hip-hop: 50 Cent, Timbaland, Eminem, his manager Paul Rosenberg, and several Universal Music executives (including the don himself, Jimmy Iovine) show up to explain their relative positions in all this, as well as a lot of the folks from the warez scene, some of whom ended up doing time for file sharing. (MTV Films and Universal are clearly big parts of this doc, so there was no way it could get too anti-biz.) It’s an interesting, entertaining look at an extremely volatile moment in time for the music business, not to mention a terrific ad for the book.
How Music Got Free
Documentary Spotlight, World Premiere
Thursday, March 14, 5:30pm, State TheaterCatch up with all of The Austin Chronicle‘s SXSW 2024 coverage.
This article appears in March 8 • 2024.