The Day Music Went Digital
Monday Music Club with Will Anderson
The episode explores the late 1990s and early 2000s music industry crisis triggered by digital file-sharing, focusing on how albums began leaking before streaming existed. Host Will Anderson and
Key takeaways
- Del Glover, a line manager at Universal Music's Shelby, North Carolina plant, smuggled out untracked master CDs by hiding them in plastic gloves inside a plastics grinder and concealing them behind his belt buckle.
- The MP3 format was developed by German scientist Carl Brandenburg using psychoacoustics to remove inaudible frequencies, drastically reducing file sizes while maintaining perceived audio quality.
Main topics
- MP3 technology and psychoacoustics
- Digital music leaks and file-sharing crews
Notable quotes
"The MP3 was the brainchild of a scientist named Carl Brandenburg. He worked for a state-run research organization in Germany."
Conclusion
The episode highlights how unauthorized digital sharing and technological innovation forced a
Transcript preview
Speaker 3 (0:00) Support for Monday Music Club comes from Sonos. There's no denying that an amazing sound system can elevate a song's emotional impact. Sonos lets you sink into a song and hear it the way it was meant to be heard. Sonos is a holistic sound system with speakers and tech that work together and bring you sound throughout your home. Keep an eye or an ear out for a segment later in the episode where I'll show you how I use my Sonos Adventure Set to elevate all the audio I listen to in my home and on the go. Visit Sonos.com and build your system. Sonos. Love the sound. Feel the system. Speaker 1 (0:35) Hey guys, Cassidy Hubberth here. This week on And Mom, beloved reporter and beauty queen, Allie LaForce opens up about IVF and an incurable genetic disorder, the stress and shame of miscarriage, and the one thing that would have helped her with her transition into motherhood. Check out the latest episode of And Mom wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (0:57) In the year 2000, albums were leaking and no one knew how. This was the era before Spotify, before you could type in the title of any song ever recorded and listen to it right there on your phone or in your car. This was the era ruled by the CD. But no matter how many precautions they took in making these CDs or how tight security was around their release, the biggest albums in the world were still getting out early and it was a complete Mystery How. This mystery had massive implications for the music business, whose entire money-making model revolved around the CD. At their peak, CDs accounted for 92 % of music sales in the United States and $13.2 billion in revenue. They were a cash cow. They cost a grand total of 50 cents to produce and were sold for $17, which was a 3,000 % markup. But none of that mattered by 2000. What mattered was that the albums were leaking, and if the music industry couldn't figure out how it was happening, they were in big, big trouble. Today's episode is about that mystery. It involves corporate greed and the early internet and the FBI. But most importantly, it's a story that can be traced back to one piece of technology that made these leaks possible and that would eventually go on to change the music industry forever. Today's story is really about the MP3. I'm Will Anderson, and this is the Monday Music Club. Speaker 3 (2:30) This story is crazy to me. It is like a mystery that you would see on television. It involves twists and turns and subterfusion and early internet message boards. It blew my mind when I read it. So with the help of Stephen Witt's book, How Music Got Free, and our guest today, Jason Frank, a writer from Vulture, we're going to dive into this story of the 90s, of the MP3, and the most prolific music hacker of all time. But before we can do that, we have to start at the beginning. Speaker 3 (3:01) Act 1, the setup. In 2002, Universal Music Group owned a disc manufacturing plant in rural Shelby, North Carolina. If you've never been to Shelby, you can think about it like any small town in the South. Think lots of woods and forests, rolling hills, very small town Americana vibes. But this factory was huge. It was 300,000 square feet. It employed 600 people and was really the centerpiece of this town. It was the biggest thing going on anywhere near it. On a busy day, it could produce 500,000 CDs at its peak. But the management team at the plant had a problem. A mysterious online hacker who went by the ominous name of Darkman was leaking albums that had come directly from their plant. This was a massive issue because A, they didn't know who was giving Darkman the albums to leak. And B, they did not know how they were getting them out of the plant. It could have been anybody who worked there and they had to figure it out very, very fast. The head of security, a man named Steve Van Buren, instituted these really strict protocols to try to stop the leaks. Workers who were coming onto a shift and the workers who were coming out of a shift couldn't make physical contact with each other just in case they were handing CDs to each other. The CDs were tracked at every step of the process, and they would do random security checks of one out of every five employees with metal detectors as they were leaving their shifts. So it'd be almost impossible for you to get a CD out. without getting randomly checked one day. One man on the management team who understood the problems of leaking and hacking more than anybody else was a line manager named Del Glover. Del was 24 years old. He was a guy who worked hard and played hard. He did 12-hour days, six days a week, and he loved Speaker 4 (4:54) his job. I think what's so interesting about the story is that Del Glover is this incredibly normal man who randomly gets a job. He's not a music obsessive in any way. He was also a computer Speaker 3 (5:09) and internet whiz and understood the internet better than anybody else on the management team. He and his best friend, a guy who also worked at the plant named Tony Dockery, were deep in the woods of the early internet. Dell was obsessed with computers. He bought a new computer three times in 1996 because they kept getting better and better throughout the year. And by the fall of 1996, he was one of the very first people in his area to sign up for satellite broadband. And if you don't remember this time, it was so much faster than the dial-up connection most people were using. It was 10 times the speed of dial-up, and he was all over it. And here's the thing. Even he thought about trying to leak discs from the plants and then trying to sell them, but he decided very early on that the juice was not worth the squeeze. But still, how the albums were getting smuggled out of the facility and onto the computer of Darkman was a mystery, especially when you know how CDs at the plant were made, because the security was incredibly tight. The digital master tape came directly from the studio under heavy, heavy security. This was the original, final recording that the band or artist had made that was then going to be copied onto these CDs. The master tape was then cloned using a clear production mold. So this mold was used to create perfect copies from virgin discs. So you had these little tiny discs that were completely blank, and that was the one copy that they would use for these standard CDs that they were making. The discs were then sent to an assembly line where they were lacquered and sent to packaging. They were then shrink-wrapped in these jewel cases and boxed up and look exactly like those CDs we all knew from the 90s. And remember, these CDs were tracked Every step of the way, they knew exactly which CDs were where in this process and when. But still, it was no use. These albums were leaking and they'd have these huge meetings about it. The head of security, Van Buren, would go through all the protocols and remind everybody of the consequences of leaking, but obviously it didn't help at all. Del Glover would sit through these security meetings next to his friend Tony, silently trying to crack this puzzle. Even with all their know-how and their awareness that these leaks were coming from the plant, the management team could not figure out how they were getting leaked to Darkman. But Del Glover thought he had a pretty good idea. Speaker 3 (7:30) Now, when I say albums were getting leaked, what do I mean? Well, a leak is an unauthorized release onto the internet of a song or an album in the form of a downloadable audio file, which was often the MP3. The MP3 was the brainchild of a scientist named Carl Brandenburg. He worked for a state-run research organization in Germany. Think Bell Labs or the Edison Company here in America. which were organizations that found ways to make money off people's inventions, whether that's in medicine, in technology, or whatever. Carl Brandenburg himself studied a fringe science called psychoacoustics, and this was a study of the way that human beings perceive sound. What psychoacoustics always found was that human ears are not just like microphones picking up everything. Evolution has made it so the human ear hears specific ranges of frequencies or tones better, like the tones that make up the sound of a human voice or animal cries. But a lot of the frequencies on this sound spectrum of tones could not be heard by the human ear.