"How Music Got Free", "Between You & Me"

[fiefoe]

It's interesting to read about history one actually lived through -- so many music acts I recognize for once! Stephen Richard Witt's multi-pronged book covers the technologists, the pirates, the music industry executives and even law enforcement officers.

• First, Zwicker had shown that human hearing was best at a certain range of pitch frequencies, roughly corresponding to the tonal range of the human voice.
  Second, Zwicker had shown that tones that were close in pitch tended to cancel each other out. In particular, lower tones overrode higher ones, so if you were digitizing music with overlapping instrumentation—say a violin and a cello at the same time—you could assign fewer bits to the violin.
  Third, Zwicker had shown that the auditory system canceled out noise following a loud click.
  Fourth—and this is where it gets weird—Zwicker had shown that the auditory system also canceled out noise prior to a loud click. This was because it took a few milliseconds for the ear to actually process what it was sensing, and this processing could be disrupted by a sudden onrush of louder noise.
• The two methods complemented each other perfectly: Brandenburg’s algorithm for complicated, overlapping noise; Huffman’s for pure, simple tones.
• In late 1988, the team made its first sale, and shipped a hand-built decoder to the first ever end user of mp3 technology: a tiny radio station run by missionaries on the remote Micronesian island of Saipan.
• But one audio source was proving intractable: what Grill, with his imperfect command of English, called “the lonely voice.” (He meant “lone.”) Human speech could not, in isolation, be psychoacoustically masked. Nor could you use Huffman’s pattern recognition approach—the essence of speech was its dynamic nature, its plosives and sibilants and glottal stops. Brandenburg’s shrinking algorithm could handle symphonies, guitar solos, cannons, even “Oye Mi Canto,” but it still couldn’t handle a newscast. ... The second was a snippet of Suzanne Vega singing the opening bars of “Tom’s Diner,” her 1987 radio hit.
• Still, history showed that, from the AC/DC “Current Wars” of the late nineteenth century to the VHS-Betamax battle of the 1980s, victory didn’t necessarily go to the best, but to the most vicious.
• Philips had convinced Fraunhofer to adopt its own inefficient methodology, then pointed to this exact inefficiency to sink them with the standards committees.
• He then turned around and licensed these to his biggest customer: the National Hockey League. Here, finally, was a stroke of good fortune. One of the key reference materials in Bernhard Grill’s menagerie of exotic sounds was a recording of a German-league professional hockey game. The sound of scattered clapping had always been a challenge for the encoder, particularly when set against a dynamic soundscape of scraping skates and brutal, bone-crushing checks... The NHL was the perfect customer: the mp3 had been specifically calibrated to the sound of the game.
• By the time the units finally shipped in late 1994, the hockey players had gone on strike.
• Linde reported back to Thomson headquarters with the startling news: on an overlooked line item in the corporate R&D budget, six German nerds were sitting on a gold mine. The response from corporate was skeptical. If the mp3 was so great, how come no one was using it?
• Linde pushed the team to apply for a patent on the device, but ultimately the Fraunhofer group decided that an mp3 player was nothing more than a storage device.
• Thomson didn’t really seem interested in the project anymore, and AT&T had walked away after the final disappointment in Erlangen. So they began to discuss a new idea: they’d replace the mp3 with a second-generation psychoacoustic encoder, one that would be faster to run, one that would be easier to use, and one that would not use MUSICAM’s goddamned filter bank.
• Fraunhofer eventually gave the project a less combative name: Advanced Audio Coding (AAC). Brandenburg enlisted corporate stakeholders into the AAC project from the very start. Sony, AT&T, and Dolby were all given large shares, with the understanding that they would fight as hard for AAC as Philips was fighting for the mp2.
• Tupac’s All Eyez on Me, released during the brief period in early 1996 when Interscope did not have a corporate partner. With its hit single “California Love,” the double album was Tupac’s masterpiece,
• Iovine instead distributed the album in a one-off deal with Dutch-owned Philips, meaning the compact discs for All Eyez on Me were pressed at the PolyGram plant in Kings Mountain, North Carolina.
• Morris changed the name of MCA to Universal Music Group. On the strength of Tupac’s back-catalog sales, the rebranded UMG crawled its way out of the cellar in 1996,
• In the late 1990s, on the strength of the CD boom, the recording industry enjoyed the most profitable years in its history. The economy was overflowing, aggregate demand was strong, and Americans were spending more money on recorded music than ever before. Profit margins were expanding as well, as efficiency gains in compact disc manufacturing brought the per-unit cost of goods below a dollar
• Consolidation in the radio industry also helped, creating a homogenous nationwide listening environment that could propel an album to platinum status almost instantly on the basis of a single hit.
• Something like this had happened before, in the early 1980s, with the home audio cassette, after the introduction of the dual-head tape deck. The investment bankers considered this a relevant case study. They had dusted off a 16-year-old analysis of the adverse effects of the home-taping craze, conducted by the economist Alan Greenspan, ... Instead, Greenspan figured, the only way to reverse the sales slump was through an aggressive campaign of law enforcement against the bootleggers. In other words, the success of capitalism required vigorous intervention from the state.
• And so, toward the end of 1996, Fraunhofer was preparing to retire the mp3. Its development was complete, and there was no longer anyone actively working on it. The plan was to shift the technology’s limited customer base to the second-generation Advanced Audio Coding, which was now nearing completion. AAC had delivered on its promise. It was 30 percent faster than the mp3 and employed a variety of new techniques that allowed it to compress files with perfect transparency even beyond the 12-to-1 goal.
• But when it came to the mysterious period of late 1996 to early 1997, every one of them drew a blank. No one—not one—could remember the first time they’d heard the word “piracy.”
• Somewhere in the underworld, L3Enc, the DOS-based shareware encoder Grill had programmed several years back, was being used to create thousands upon thousands of pirated files. Meanwhile, somewhere else in the underworld, the commercial WinPlay3 player that supposedly self-destructed after twenty uses had been cracked, enabling full functionality. Together, the two were now being distributed in chat rooms and websites as a bundled package.
• In late March of this year, Weekly put 110 music files—including cuts from the Beastie Boys, R.E.M., Cypress Hill and Natalie Merchant—on his personal Web server, run through the university system. Soon, more than 2,000 people a day were visiting, representing more than 80% of Stanford’s outgoing network traffic.
• At the meeting, he demonstrated the use of the file, then urged the RIAA to adopt this technology at once. The best way to get ahead of mp3 piracy, he believed, was to provide a legal substitute. He was informed, diplomatically, that the music industry did not believe in electronic music distribution.
• Still, if they’d really cared, the RIAA could at least have referred Brandenburg to a major label. But they didn’t do that either. And that was for a third reason, the best explanation of all: their technical people told them not to. The studio engineers hated the mp3. ... This guildlike resistance to the technology proved to be the biggest hurdle to early adoption.
• The RIAA snub was a minor setback for Brandenburg. For the music business, it was a terrible, unforced error.
• Most listeners didn’t care about quality, and the obsession with perfect sound forever was an early indicator that the music industry didn’t understand its customers.
• The academic institutions themselves were unwitting accomplices, and music piracy became to the late ’90s what drug experimentation was to the late ’60s: a generation-wide flouting of both social norms and the existing body of law, with little thought of consequences.
• For six years the mp3 had been the leading technology of its kind in the world. During that period it had managed to capture a fractional sliver of the total market. Now, with the introduction of AAC, it was officially obsolete, discharged from service by its own inventor, and suddenly it was the format of the future.
• for German law guaranteed inventors a certain percentage of royalties, and this was an inalienable right, one that could not be negotiated away.
• But Brandenburg was careful not to let this happen. Instead, he split the marketplace, directing AAC toward industrial applications like cell phones and high-definition TV, while pushing the mp3 to home consumers for use with their music... Why did he do this? Well, though he earned money from both standards, his stake in the mp3 earnings was greater. It also kept his colleagues happy, rewarding them for decades of work. And consumers were unlikely to complain...  Still, from an engineering perspective, there was only one word for this kind of maneuvering: politics.
• MPEG had snubbed him many times. In 1990 it had inserted a cancerous tumor into his tech. In 1995 it had betrayed him, gutted him, and left him for dead. Now, in 1998, he basically ran the thing.
• Kali’s leadership brought a kind of military discipline to the group. He was a natural spymaster, a master of surveillance and infiltration, the Karla of music piracy. He read Billboard like a racing form, and used it to untangle the confusing web of corporate acquisitions and pressing agreements that determined what CDs would be manufactured, where, and when. Once this map of the distribution channels was charted, he began an aggressive campaign of recruitment, patiently building a network of moles that would over the next eight years manage to burrow into the supply chains of every major music label.
• There was an email being forwarded around Fraunhofer detailing the results of the latest catchall survey for English-language search terms: “mp3” had become the Internet’s most-searched-for word, surpassing even “sex.” When Popp saw it, he laughed, and, after 12 years of tension, finally relaxed. The format war was over.
• Despite all this, Apple’s rise to market dominance in the 2000s relied, at least initially, on acting almost like a money launderer for the spoils of Napster.
• If music piracy was the ’90s equivalent of experimentation with illegal drugs, then Apple had invented the vaporizer.
• The two engaged in a long, sometimes acrimonious flirtation. They were a study in opposites. Morris believed in the power of market research, and was willing to let consumers tell him what to sell. Jobs was skeptical of market research,
• That logic was at the core of the BitTorrent technology, but eliminating download queues was just the beginning. The greatest benefit of the torrent approach was the way it solved one of the Internet’s long-outstanding problems: the traffic bottleneck... This inversion of the traditional paradigm of file distribution had a startling result: with torrents, the more people who attempted to simultaneously download a file, the faster the download went.
• Oink became the premier destination for the tech-obsessed music nerd (and his close cousin, the music-obsessed tech nerd). Public trackers like the Pirate Bay were overrun by plebs
• Then 100,000. Ellis the elitist presided over it all. It was a beautiful thing: no low-quality encodes, no fakes, no dupes, no movies, no TV shows. Just music. All of it, in perfect digital clarity. All the music ever recorded.
• Apple stores were generating more sales per square foot than any business in the history of retail. The wrapped-up box with a sleek wafer-sized Nano inside was the most popular gift in the history of Christmas. Apple had created the most ubiquitous gadget in the history of stuff.
• They continued to shake the APC tree for quite some time, until finally in early 2006 someone finally cracked. His name was Jonathan Reyes, of College Station, Texas, and he was known online as “JDawg.” Reyes had established contact with a member of Rabid Neurosis, and, through a shared FTP server, thought he might be able to provide the suspect’s IP address. The FBI pursued this lead, and, finally, in late 2006, Vu reported to his superiors with the good news: he’d finally wiretapped the Internet connection of a member of RNS.
• Take the artist Nick Drake. Obscure in his lifetime, Drake sold only 5,000 copies of his final album Pink Moon before overdosing on pills in 1974 at the age of 26. Over the next 25 years his reputation grew slowly. ... But the effect on Drake’s back catalog was dramatic—the advertisers had done a better job selling the music than the car.
• The result was illegal, of course, but it was also something of great value, produced cooperatively, and built in naked opposition to the expectations of in-kind reward that supposedly governed human behavior in the capitalist age. Ellis’ life during this period took on simple, almost monastic dimensions. He lived in a shared apartment in a shit town in the middle of nowhere, commuted in the morning to a hump job no one cared about, then returned each day as the venerable abbot of the online world.
• The names on the NFOs that year read like the invite list for the Grammys: Akon, Ani DiFranco, Barry Manilow, Bette Midler, Beyoncé, Billy Ray Cyrus, Bob Seger, Built to Spill, Busta Rhymes, the Buzzcocks, Christina Aguilera, DJ Shadow, Elvis Costello, the Foo Fighters, the Game, Ghostface Killah, Gucci Mane, Hilary Duff, Hot Chip, the Indigo Girls, Insane Clown Posse, Jars of Clay, Jimmy Buffett, John Legend, Kenny Rogers, Korn, LCD Soundsystem, Madonna, Morrissey, My Chemical Romance, Neil Young, Nelly Furtado, Nick Cave, Nine Inch Nails, Oasis, Omarion, Pearl Jam, Pharrell, Pitbull, Primus, Prince, Public Enemy, Regina Spektor, Rick Ross, Rihanna, the Roots, the Scissor Sisters, Shakira, Stereolab, Sting, Taylor Swift, Three 6 Mafia, Toby Keith, Tony Bennett, Tool, and “Weird Al” Yankovic. The scale of activity was taxing,
• and many members of RNS were outgrowing it. When the music Scene had gotten its start in 1996, most of the participants were teenagers. Now those same pioneers were approaching 30, and the glamour was fading. Plus, the leakers tended to decline in value as they grew older. They outgrew their jobs at college radio stations or found more lucrative careers than music journalism. They gained a better appreciation of the legal risks, or accumulated undesirable baggage like social lives or scruples.
• Their behavior at this point could fairly be described as compulsive. Both had tried to quit the Scene two different times, but found themselves unable. Years later, Glover could not find the words to explain precisely what motivated him to keep going at this point.
• His growing familiarity with these attractive economics were what led Morris to propose the music video syndication service known as Vevo. Many years earlier, at the dawn of the MTV era, the decision had been made to use music videos as promotional devices for album sales. Morris had always decried this decision, and now he saw a chance to reverse it. Throughout 2008 and 2009, he oversaw the creation of a centralized repository for more than 45,000 videos, stretching back forty years. With the birth of Vevo, music videos were repurposed as economic assets of their own, in some cases earning far more than the albums they were intended to promote.
• Over the next 25 years the asset value of the Beatles catalog would appreciate more than twenty times, even as it paid out enormous sums in unrestricted cash. The catalog outpaced returns of the U.S. stock market by a 3-to-1 margin,
• Kaminska outlined the precise factors that had led Morris to slash his own operating budgets by more than 50 percent: Negative rates are a function of global abundance (brought on by technological advances), and a trend that cannot be stopped even by the strongest central bank . . . For rates to stay positive we have to hoard almost everything in the world from the people that need it, if it is to have value. The artificial scarcity tactics that have been used through the ages to achieve this are getting harder to execute because of technological liberation—which is enabling the emergence of collaborative economy which bypasses rates of return.
• But the overall damage was compartmentalized. APC had lost 18 people; RNS only lost six. Kali’s emphasis on anonymity had proven prescient, and his decision to spike the group had come just in the nick of time. He hadn’t saved himself, perhaps, but he’d saved the rank and file:
• several jurors had said that, while they understood the defendants were probably guilty, they didn’t agree with the severity of the potential punishment, so they had instead decided on acquittals. The legal term for this was “nullification.” It referred to an unusual feature of the American legal system, one that prosecutors and judges tried to keep quiet. Nullification was the prerogative of juries, while accepting a preponderance of evidence, to override laws they saw as unjust. This was the real reason for Chow’s not guilty verdict, and probably Cassim’s too.
• made their way into the factories themselves. They had leaked 3,000 albums a year across every genre. Across the globe they had built a network of infiltration and dissemination. In the shadows of the Internet they had stashed their secret troves of pirated material and kept them locked under uncrackable encryption. A team of expert FBI agents and a small army of private detectives had tried, and failed, to work their way into the group for more than five years.
• In 2011, for the first time since the invention of the phonograph, Americans spent more money on live music than recorded. In 2012, North American sales of digital music surpassed sales of the compact disc. In 2013, revenues from subscription and advertiser-supported streaming passed $1 billion for the first time.

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Mary Norris makes me feel okay about always feeling unsure about using hyphens.

• One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey. And in turn it feeds you more experience.
• He wanted to rename certain letters of the alphabet: h (aitch) should be “more properly” “he”; w (double-u) should be “we”; y (why) should be “yi.” Yikes. It is owing to Webster that in America the British “zed” became “zee.”
• Eventually, that copy editor went back to where she had come from. “It’s as if I tried to become a nun and failed,” she confided. It did sometimes feel as if we belonged to some strange cloistered order, the Sisters of the Holy Humility of Hyphens.
• The awful truth about hyphens and copy editors is that if there is one you want to take it out and if there’s not one you’re tempted to put one in.
• Lu Burke used to pester the style editor, Hobie Weekes, who had been at the magazine since 1928, to get rid of the diaeresis. Like Mr. Hyphen, Lu was a modern independent-minded reader, and she didn’t need to have her vowels micromanaged. Once, in the elevator, Weekes seemed to be weakening. He told her he was on the verge of changing that style and would be sending out a memo soon. And then he died. This was in 1978. No one has had the nerve to raise the subject since.
• Dashes, like table forks, come in different sizes, and there is a proper use for each. The handiest member of the dash family is the one-em dash. Think of it as the dinner fork, the one on the inside, which you use for your main dish. The em is a printer’s unit approximately the width of a capital letter M.
• She likes to think of the semicolon as a comma with vibrato. (She plays the viola.)
• Instead of building emoticons out of punctuation marks ((((:>)), the Victorians built emotions into their punctuation.
• when you think about it, suspense is what punctuation is all about: how is the author going to finish the sentence?
• “Apostrophe” means “turn from,” and refers to a rhetorical device in which the actor turns from the action and addresses someone or something who is not there.