It's not just Napster that has undermined the music business

All music lovers remember how the world changed dramatically around the turn of the millennium with the introduction of the MP3; suddenly file sharing made it possible to find any song at any time. But where does music come from, and why did Apple release the 10,000-song capacity iPod in 2001, knowing full well that no one would pay $1 per song to (legally) fill it?

A new documentary, How music became freeattempts to answer these questions while introducing its audience to a host of relevant characters, from A-list artists to music pirates themselves along the way.

Premiering Tuesday on Paramount+ and produced by LeBron James and Eminem, the two-part documentary details how file-sharing technology led to some of the largest and most disruptive online leaks of new music, much to the dismay of the industry. The doc is based on the book of the same name by Stephen Witt, who with director Alex Stapleton (Shut up and dribble; Hello, Privilege. It's me, Chelsea) set out to explore how an entire generation became accustomed to the idea that music should be free.

Stapleton tells The Daily Beast that there's a lot more to this story than people think, and that it should make us wonder who got in trouble. [for piracy] and who sees us as criminals or thieves, and who sees us as innovators.

Following the music industry's adoption of CD technology in the 1980s, MP3 was invented in 1995, paving the way for the pirated music hub Napster that would emerge four years later. The music industry initially tried to shut down the site, but only gave it more attention and more illegal downloads. pursue for copyright infringement.

By 2002, unpurchased music was already widely available online, but pirates upped the ante by releasing Eminem's then-highly anticipated new album. The Eminem Show almost a month before it was even finished. Record executives wondered how this leak had happened, and as more and more new music was leaked to the public, costing the industry millions of dollars, the mystery only deepened. deepen.

No one would have guessed at the time that the culprits were a ragtag group of employees at the Universal Music CD pressing plant in Shelby, North Carolina, who supplied online pirates with unreleased music. They were severely underpaid for the work they did, Stapleton told The Daily Beast.

Former employees explain in the document how they took CDs out of the factory through their belt loops or stuck on plates of food. But that was only half the battle, the rest being orchestrated by Dell Glover, a factory manager who was also a self-taught computer genius. We know Steve Jobs, we know Jimmy Iovine, we know what happened to a lot of other people who were involved in all of this. But no one knew the hackers and no one knew who Dell was, Stapleton says.

A black high school graduate who had no formal computer training, Glover had worked his way up in the CD factory, one of the only places available to work at the time in Shelby, becoming one of its managers the most efficient. Glover's computer prowess eventually led him into the world of music piracy, where he saw an opportunity to bring a touch of joy and economic revival to his small, poor town where many people could not afford to pay full price for music or movies and earn extra money for their family.

By contributing pirated music to the dark web, Glover gained access to servers containing terabytes of entertainment-filled data that he would provide to local businesses, increasing their profits by giving them pirated content to sell. Years after the operation began, Dell was finally arrested by the FBI, convicted and served three months in prison. Meanwhile, Apple had reinvented itself with the iPod, allowing it to take advantage of the pirated music craze.

Steve Jobs made a lot of money from the iPod, Stapleton told The Daily Beast. It really resurrected the brand and [iPods were] full of pirated music. So how do we view it compared to someone like Dell?

This is the question at the origin of How music became free. Stapleton explains that what drew her to this project was the opportunity to tell the story of a black Southerner whose history was completely in shock and to allow people to finally discover the truth, and perhaps that it will make us see things differently.

The documentary aims to give as much context to this conversation so that you don't get stuck in the idea that this person is stealing something, the director adds. [So that people] understand that it's a very poor area, deprived of things that other cities have, and when you don't pay people anything, that to me is the biggest problem to make up for what they took.

The web of events at the center of the musical revolution is complex. Where Glover managed to fill an economic void for his city, the free music he released led to job losses at all levels at Universal. It also harmed the artists themselves. Eminem and 50 Cent, who both appear in the documentary to discuss the impact of piracy on their hip-hop careers at the time, expressed the rage they felt at the idea of ​​their music being leaked before it is finished. But while artists argued for a legislative solution, politicians mocked the dirty music they produced. The music industry stood alone.

In an effort to plug the hole they couldn't find before discovering Glover was involved in the mess, the Recording Industry Association of America began prosecuting teenagers for sharing music files online, attacking their own biggest fans and destroy lives In the process. Stapleton says suing the children was clearly a mistake, but the events that led to the lawsuits go much deeper than the industry's response.

How music became free shines a light on race and access in America, says the director. If Dell [Glover] was a white man born in Los Angeles, San Francisco or New York, the story would have been completely different. I really have faith that people will watch this and understand how race played a role on different levels.

She also says that history might teach us a thing or two about how to deal with AI, a growing disruptor in music creation and distribution today. [This] The story is about CDs and MP3s and took place some time ago, but the drama and friction between technology and art is very present right now, she says.

I hope the takeaway is that we can potentially step outside of our echo chambers of only big businesses, corporations, to provide the answers to what society will look like in terms of [AI] and these companies. Perhaps we should look beyond that and into some of the most unlikely places.