With the launch of Tidal and Apple Music, along with Spotify breaking its own increasingly impressive streaming records on a regular basis, this year is looking to be a particularly pivotal one for the music industry. Which also means it’s the beginning of the end for the preferred format of the last two decades or so: the MP3. Stephen Witt’s recent book How Music Got Free doubles as a detailed ode to the MP3 as it tells the story of three men grappling with digital compression technology and its widespread fallout: German engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg, who created the MP3 and fought to steer it toward ubiquity; 76-year-old music exec Doug Morris, who has led all three of the remaining major labels across his indefatigable career and was stymied by the proliferation of the MP3; and Dell Glover, who worked in a North Carolina CD manufacturing plant and surreptitiously ripped many of the biggest albums of the 2000s—by the likes of Eminem, Jay-Z, and Kanye West—en route to becoming the world’s leading leaker of pre-release music.
According to Witt’s account, these three relatively unknown figures spurred on the tectonic shifts within the music industry over the last few decades and changed how we listen to and consider music today. For instance, there’s probably no Napster without MP3s, and there’s no MP3s without Brandenburg; the piracy enabled by Glover may not have been so widely embraced if Morris hadn’t helped to build the industry up to be such a money-hungry behemoth in the first place. Nobody in the book gets off scot-free, with Morris suffering losses and PR disasters as a result of his technical ignorance, Brandenburg missing out on the hardware market that would eventually lead to the iPod, and Glover ultimately serving a short prison sentence as a result of his rampant copyright infringement. How Music Got Free tells of supreme innovation as well as stubborn hard-headedness, and though its trio of principle characters never actually cross paths in real life, it’s tempting to consider what would have happened if they did, what crises may have been avoided. “Technically, the music industry could have launched something like Apple Music in the ‘90s,” Witt tells me. “But it took them 15 years to figure it all out.”
"After years of hostility, the technologists and the rights holders are now working in cooperation to essentially conspire against us."
Pitchfork: It seems like a lot of the problems the music industry ran into with the rise of the MP3 could have been avoided with more communication between the technology people and the label people.
Stephen Witt: From our vantage point, it’s easy to look back and say, “Wow, what a bunch of bonehead moves.” But one of the things that’s interesting to me is that each of the characters was really smart in some way but then completely boneheaded in another way. Brandenburg had a terrific understanding of technology and human anatomy and mathematics, but the guy couldn’t even patent the most obvious device that he invented, the portable music player. Glover is this total hustler who sees opportunities but he’s completely dimwitted about the legal consequences of what he’s doing. And Doug Morris can listen to an album and say “I don’t hear a hit here” and he’s usually right—artists don’t like that, but it’s true, and he’s good at managing capital. But when it came to technology, for a long time, he was an utter dunce.
Pitchfork: Morris is an interesting case because he’s been this huge force in the music industry for so long, but the general public has no idea who he is.
SW: He never had the profile of Clive Davis or Ahmet Ertegun, even though he was more powerful than either one of them. He now runs Sony so he is still super busy; he’s best friends with [Apple Music chief] Jimmy Iovine, so they’re constantly scheming about some new thing to take over the music industry. Usually it fails, but they always have a plan.
Morris was the hardest one to convince to talk to me. In the proposal for this book, he came off much worse, like a classic recording executive heavy. But that proposal leaked, and he didn’t like how he was portrayed, so he called me into his office. As I got to know him, he became a sympathetic character. I mean, he’s not exactly the nicest person but he has his motivations; to the extent that there’s going to be a business of music, someone like this is going to have to be in charge. It was obvious to just paint a target on these guys’ backs, so I thought it might be interesting to get inside his head and see how he thinks about culture.
There's a certain view that all recording industry executives are just vultures profiting off the creative talents of people who are more skilled than them, but I don't actually feel that's true. The executives take a lot of risk and they frequently try to back artists that lose money. I remember someone saying, “Why aren't there more female rappers?” Well, it's because the major labels invested in Lady Sovereign and Kreayshawn, and they were huge fucking busts. And when these labels lose money, they never forget it. If you talk to Morris, he’ll still go on about Pressplay, this music service they tried to launch 15 years ago that nobody remembers—he's still pissed. I think it's true with the artists as well. The public forgets, but they don't.
But Morris isn’t a shark; he’s almost more like a Bill Clinton figure. He’s very political and understands how to charm people. He’s also at times a petulant child, but I think even that is like a long-term negotiating tactic. To have a career like his you have to be very canny. He’s run all three major music companies and he’s still signing Miley Cyrus at Sony and he’s 76-years-old, which is kind of extraordinary. It turned out that he is driven by rationality and an almost-scientific approach to music rather than taste. If you look at the top of the charts, where the major labels’ bread and butter is, it’s stuff like Josh Groban and the soundtrack to Frozen. They have to spend way more time thinking about that than they do about a mid-tier artist like Sky Ferreira or even Miguel, who’s a great musician, but he’s not going to make or break their year in the way that an Adele record would. So Morris has essentially been taking a moneyball approach since the ‘60s, although he never would have called it that.
Pitchfork: The irony is that, even though Morris was so statistically minded, he didn’t see that technology could offer so much data about how people consume music.
SW: Now, he’s obsessed with all that information: Vevo, which he created, can see where people are listening to specific videos, and they use it to schedule tours—it’s unbelievable what they do with the data part of it now. But he was late to that. The major labels always understood that piracy was a massive risk to the business, but what they missed is how, to a computer engineer, a rack of CDs isn’t inventory—it’s an array of inefficiently stored data. Now, though, they all get it, and that’s why we have streaming services.
"For musicians, it’s like facing a difficult two-front war with the pirates on one side and the streaming services on the other."
Pitchfork: The book’s timeline doesn’t reach the streaming era, but how do you feel about the more recent developments involving music and technology?
SW: Spotify was founded in 2006, and the iPhone launched in 2007, and there was a real paradigm shift right around then. In the earliest days of personal computing, decisions were made that gave the users an enormous amount of freedom—the PC was supposed to be a productive tool that we used to collaboratively build new things and exchange information without oversight, and that was really wonderful. But it also created an enormous amount of pain for the rights holders. But now, the smartphone is a very closed device. I can’t torrent off my phone, and they only allow certain kinds of applications to go through. So the user has gone from somebody who’s supposed to be empowered to essentially a customer from whom value is supposed to be extracted. So after years of hostility, the technologists and the rights holders are now working in cooperation to essentially conspire against us. [laughs]
Pitchfork: I just read about a new app called Popcorn Time that allows people to torrent movies without jailbreaking their phones, which I hadn’t seen before.
SW: Maybe that’s the new frontier of piracy. Let me tell you what Dell Glover is doing now: He started a new side business where he buys 20 cheap-ass Chinese commodity computers for $50 each, formats them, and then installs something like Popcorn Time—and then he sell those for $200 bucks a pop to people around town so they can cut cable using torrents or pirate streaming sites. In the past three months, he told me he’s sold about 300 of these things and made about $45,000. He thinks it’s legal because he’s not actually giving you any pirated media, he’s just selling you a Linux box with some open-source home theater software installed on it. In the book, I call him the man who destroyed to music industry to put rims on his car. But now he’s really into fishing, so he’s the guy who is destroying the cable entertainment complex to buy a pontoon boat.
"If you’re moving to a purely streaming economy, which will happen, why does an artist need a music label at all?"
Pitchfork: Who do you think will come out on top in the streaming music battle?
SW: Well, first of all, it's important to remember that, although Apple seems predominant, they only control about 20% of the global smartphone operating system market worldwide. The biggest player by far is Google's Android, and Google is currently testing it's own service called YouTube Music Key, along with a bundled subscription to YouTube itself, which would give you ad-free access to all their music videos. So that could prove to be just as powerful as Apple Music. Between them, those two companies control 96% of the smartphone OS market, and they have $100 billion to burn. That's powerful competition. Simultaneously, though, it's possible that something like Spotify can still succeed. [Spotify founder] Daniel Ek often refers to Dropbox, which still does quite well even though both Google Drive and Apple Cloud are out there. The worst thing that could happen from a consumer's perspective is that these services start bidding wars for artists to sign exclusive deals, and then the biggest stars are scattered among three or four services.
Pitchfork: Which would likely just give way to more piracy.
SW: I would think so. For musicians, it’s like facing a difficult two-front war with the pirates on one side and the streaming services on the other. I actually think the reason the industry is finally winning the war against piracy now is because they’ve ended up with a superior service. For the first time in probably 15 years, they can provide something that's better than the jerry-rigged systems that the pirates were building.
But paying $120 a year for music is a lot. During the peak of the CD boom, people were only paying about $70 a year on average, and the average iTunes account generates $12 a year in sales. So if they can really get 100 million people to subscribe to these models, it's bank. And it fucking costs nothing for them to do this. I mean, it costs some money, but the infrastructure is way less expensive compared to building gigantic music retailers all over the country.
Pitchfork: In the book, you mention that Steve Jobs once tried to get Morris to start a label at Apple, and it seems like Apple Music is attempting to groom its own stars now. Do you think this could be the beginning of the end for traditional music labels?
SW: From some perspectives, streaming is great for musicians, but it gives the streaming services a ton of fucking power—more than labels, actually. Getting sponsored on the front page of a streaming service could be a massive thing if there’s a lot of subscribers. And they will seekto control that channel of distribution and play favorites—every radio station does that already, and these services will too because they’re not even regulated by the F.C.C. concerns that govern classic radio play. So there’s a huge moral hazard, and that’s a problem. I think more artists are just gonna abandon labels and go for pure songwriting in a singles mode, like a return to the early ‘60s. And the move to streaming really encourages that.
And the major labels have to be very concerned about Apple Music specifically because while all of them bought equity stakes in Spotify, their deals with Apple probably aren’t as favorable. At the same time, they sort of can’t afford not to be on Apple. But it may eventually make them go away. I mean, why is it called a “label”? Because, historically, you smacked a label onto physical copy of something you shipped. Now that whole concept is obsolete. If you’re moving to a purely streaming economy, which will happen, why does an artist need a music label at all? Why don’t they just have the streaming service do it? If all the music labels disappeared, I don’t think it would be the worst thing in the world. We’d still have great music.