How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy

How Music Got Free tells how several specific people transformed music from something sold in stores at large markups to something available freely on the internet, often before commercial release. I will oversimplify and group the stories into three basic questions. For each question, the author provides a detailed and usually counter-intuitive answer supported by tremendous research. This the book does well.

The first asks the question: how did the underlying technology required to transmit music come to be?
Answer: A handful of eccentric professors in Germany dedicated decades over several generations to perfecting digital compression technology. These professors then win a David vs Goliath battle against entrenched industry competitors to make the mp3 the dominant music format. They become quite wealthy.
The author makes the first question seem equally important to the next four, but I remain unconvinced that is the case. Once these conditions were in place, it seems likely music was going to become quite cheap, if not free, in some way. Here the author embeds the most interesting piece of analysis, arguing that patent protection was necessary to generate technological progress that made music free.
He explains: “[creating the mp3] was boring work that required the better part of a decade. The mp3 team would not have done that work without the incentive of future payoff… without patent protection the mp3 would have never existed.” The argument is interesting, but the author spends the rest of the book explaining how non-economic motivators drove various actors to tremendous lengths of innovation and hard work. He then throws this sentence about patent protection in on page 245 as if it somehow stands proven. It does not. I don’t disagree with it, but it’s not clear to me he’s proven his point.

The second asks the question: how did a record company CEO understand and react to this change?
Answer: He just kept focusing on making hits and despite almost comical success in doing so, his company shrank considerably. Then he watched his grandkid on YouTube one day, realized internet advertising existed, created Vevo and… continued to see revenues decline. He also spoke with Steve Jobs a few times.
This section, which focuses on Doug Morris the CEO of Universal Media Group, also veers into the RIAA’s aggressive litigation strategy, which the author seems to say was an actively bad idea, but only shows was not particularly fruitful. I suppose the point here is that entrenched industry participants made a lot of money, continued to play the role of finding and supporting talent, and did not participate much in how music became free and were largely oblivious to the technological and social changes occurring. This section of the book struggles to say something most readers will not have already assumed and makes up for this fact by stating ever larger dollar figures that Doug Morris has made.

The third: how did individuals become criminals to put music online, first by copying publicly available music and later by coordinating theft of not-yet released music, which by 2000 was commonly available online a month or more before release?
Answer: Well, they started in AOL chat groups sharing ordinary commercial recordings, coinciding with the advent of mp3s. Though large groups of folks share music online, it was small focus groups that put it there. These groups enjoyed doing that task, putting music online, for a whole host of reasons from ideological to technological to pure interest. That said, Witt does a nice job of arguing that these groups created a common purpose and a sense of belonging to a group.
Once commercial recordings became table stakes, entrepreneurial (read: obsessive) types set their new task as scooping new releases before they were commercially available. Witt only really explores how this transition occurs in a post-script to the paperback, but it is fascinating. He uncovers how a mundane, inclusive group of music-sharers is taken over by a ruthless personality dedicated to being the first to market with stolen music. He shows how the groups strongest members fall in line behind this personality, how they seem to derive deep personal fulfillment from their status beating others to the release of a new album. He then almost casually explains how this drives their members to blatant crime, stealing music from a variety of places on the supply chain: most notably a manufacturing plant worker who seems to have stolen hundreds of CDs and published them on the internet before their release date, eventually taking extensive efforts to subvert security. The author argues most members of this group do this without any economic gain, even suffering economic loss – and I believe that is true. That said, the only person who agreed to be interviewed by the author does appear to have generated substantial economic gains from the activity, and we spend most of this section analyzing his case in detail. So that dulls the point a bit.

This does not purport to be a book that analyzes “why music became free”, as opposed to some other outcome. The book is anecdotal, rather than theoretical, and is fairly open about that. It should not be analyzed as something it is not. The book is excellent as a related set of stories that help us understand the context, motivations, challenges, limitations and achievements of specific people.

That said I struggled with the “why” story. The author veers into this ‘why story’ haphazardly throughout the book and would do well to have put a chapter somewhere that just states his position, maybe an introduction or an appendix. His failure to do so exposes the book to its most obvious criticism, which is that he has spent a lot of time talking about surface particulars of a transition that would have occurred regardless of what any of his characters did. This rationale might sound something like: for most of history, music did not cost too much, then for a brief period record companies discovered how to produce super-normal profits through controlled distribution and nationwide marketing of physical media, then many disparate participants reversed this unusual state of affairs. On this telling, music is not free now and it never was, it has just normalized to a level of profitability that is more typical across industries. If that argument is true, then this book becomes the story of a handful of people who happened to have been the ones who made ‘music free’, but if it had not been them it would have been someone else. I do not particularly know if this argument is true and I doubt that I will ever know. But the point is central enough to the author’s central comment for the book that I think he would have been well served to marshal an opinion.