Paramount+’s compelling new music docuseries, How Music Got Free, is in Stephen Witt’s e-book of the same name, which almost wasn’t as insightful as it turned out to be. It shows how the music industry went from promoting CDs to the general public at high costs and making more money than ever before to collapsing and almost disappearing.
“I wanted to write an e-book about the history of MP3. That’s what I thought I was writing,” Witt shared in a recent verbal exchange about the start of this journey. “I went to Germany and interviewed the engineers who invented it. “, he added. They spent 10 years in this audio lab developing this complicated technology, and then it took over the world, but they weren’t talking about how it took over the world in particular. “
Those who created MP3s didn’t need to look at how the world shares and feeds on music, in part because the invention nearly brought about the downfall of the entire industry. It wasn’t the executives of the major record labels who pushed the product to the public, or even the artists. So who made MP3 a global phenomenon?”Teenagers took it from the server and started using it to hack files,” Witt confirmed, and that’s the basis of How Music Got Free.
The docuseries takes a close look at how the Internet replaced the music industry forever, immediately allowing anyone to download whatever they want for free. It didn’t take long for a race to begin between pirate teams, all of whom sought to be the first to share a superstar’s newest album or single. This required intervention from someone in the industry, and this is where the series becomes truly shocking.
How Music Got Free is not a series of advertisements and is not boring. It shows the enormous aspect of piracy and demonstrates how even one man can disrupt an entire industry, if the right opportunity arises.
I spoke with producer Witt and director Alexandria Stapleton about how music has become free, their concern even about piracy, and why they feel this story hasn’t been told sooner, even though crime has plagued the global industry for decades.
Hugh McIntyre: I went into this show thinking I knew the story, but there were so many things I didn’t realize. Tell me how it became a series.
Alexandria Stapleton: Well, it clearly starts with Stephen’s book and then Spring Hill. I was working with Spring Hill at the time. I did one of the first docuseries they did, Shut Up And Dribble, and they kept saying they were excited because they were more of a small company than they are now, and yet they had just bought Stephen’s book. They were very excited. about. One of the executives, Phil Byron, said: “It’s a crazy, explosive story that nobody understands. “
They told me about this and I won a copy of the eBook. I read a lot of e-books to prepare a presentation or a documentary, but this is the only e-book [that] as I read it, I look for how it could just in all likelihood be combined as a series.
McIntyre: Wow.
Stapleton: This just came off the page. Stephen and I met in the user and we got along well. Then the adventure of throwing in many positions began. When we introduced this, it was pre-COVID, and I think it was hard for others. People realize how you can film, because a lot of it is done on the computer. It was a challenge to overcome, but we finally found our permanent home with MTV Studios and Paramount. I can’t think of a better role for this, as one of the most interesting things about this series is the access to the MTV archive library that we were able to include.
McIntyre: Stephen, obviously this started with you, but can you tell us what led you to this story and that this is not just an article, but an entire book?
Stephen Witt: Actually, it was done absolutely the other way around. I wanted to write a book about the advantages of MP3. This is what I thought I would write. I went to Germany and interviewed the engineers who invented it. This is what I thought the story was about when I started it. I had an e-book in mind.
But as I interviewed them, I discovered that there was a hole in their story that they just didn’t talk about. They spent 10 years in this audio lab to form this fancy generation, and then it took over the world, but they didn’t talk about how it took over the world in particular because they didn’t have the buy-in. industry and had no members. gigantic engineering companies. I wondered how exactly this generational change happened.
I started looking for it and discovered a large number of documents from the internet that seemed to be from those teenagers who had taken it from the server and started hacking files.
Now the guys [waiters] suffered from selective amnesia when they talked about that period. They didn’t need anyone to know what happened. But because I started to get interested in pirates, I thought, “Oh my God, this is a story. ” So I completely reworked the book and completely reworked my own plot to be all about that. In fact, it was the first thing I wrote. I did it the other way around. Like I said, first I wrote a book and then I became a magazine journalist.
Then I was put in touch with Spring Hill and Alex. And, as Alex said, it was a little difficult to conceptualize. How can you turn that into a documentary when you have to show things on TV?Alex did a fantastic job, as did the graphic team, but it was the interviews with the pirates that we did: they did the homework on the documentary.
McIntyre: How did you get to Spring Hill and how did this verbal exchange begin?
Witt: It bounced a little bit, but a manufacturer named Phil Byron. Phil gave himself, enjoyed it, and put a lot of effort into the story. Almost legendarily difficult to achieve. Phil did a very clever job.
McIntyre: Wow. Good job, Phil. This is his first book and then, of course, he continued writing and doing journalism. How does it feel to hear about this company and have those conversations about his first book? Were you nervous about turning it into a film?
Witt: I had no idea what I was doing, so I wasn’t nervous. I thought, okay, I’m talking to a Hollywood maker. He had no experience. He had never done that before. That had never been my intention. It was quite surprising. It was definitely a little out of place at first, but navigation turned out to be relatively simple and painless.
McIntyre: Alex, there’s something specific that got you thinking: do I have to do this?
Stapleton: I felt like I was experiencing my adolescence and young adulthood in the story, plus the pirates and artists we were able to relate to. For me, the real center of the story is Shelby, Del, and the factory workers. This total world that Del built on a computer, but also when he did it in real life. That sealed the deal for me.
I’m a black southerner and I think that’s really important. I’m in this new phase of my career, I would say, where I’m really looking to extract everything imaginable from stories that other people think they understand, but they don’t. Side B is about exploring more Southern stories, more Black stories, because I feel like we’re occasionally two-dimensional as Southerners, but on a broader level.
I feel like other people never explore richness and diversity. . . and the innovation that the South has created in the fashionable times. Del’s story is definitely a story of underdogs. As a boy born in this under-resourced town, you can’t help but wonder if he was a white boy and was born in Seattle, the Bay Area, New York, or Los Angeles, what would his life be like?
The world continues to evolve rapidly with technological innovation and the combination of art and technology. I think it’s important to understand that innovators can be in some of the most unlikely places. It was in the back of my mind.
The amazing thing is that it took a while to come out, but I think it’s the best time for other people to reflect on that moment. But then, how do we apply that era to what is happening today?
Witt: yes, it’s funny. When I started writing this, what was really happening was something quite new. This happened. Over time, it became a pervasive nostalgia piece, but it actually came out at the right time. I think people, especially the younger generation who didn’t know what Napster was, who haven’t experienced that, will literally be drawn to and surprised by this material.
McIntyre: And polite. This could possibly be the first time they understand why the music industry is what they’re used to.
Stapleton: Yes.
Witt: Absolutely yes.
McIntyre: Alex, it’s appealing to hear what percentages of this attitude from Del and the other people from Shelby because as I look at it, I’m like, “Are those other people doing the right thing for them and their families?Are they bad?” Guys? Are they both?Sometimes you even felt like maybe you were on their side, based on some of the quotes left there. What do you think of those people, the pirates and the other people in Shelby?
Stapleton: Well, the other people at Shelthrough, I’m on their side all day.
They were absolutely underpaid. They literally won nothing. It’s important for people to understand that the industry charges $20 for a CD, and it costs about 20 cents to manufacture. That’s a huge profit margin. And having a factory that pays a little bit enough for other people to put food on the table, I think there’s nothing wrong with that. I felt that when it came time for the factory staff to take things off the line, I would look for them so I could protect myself. Yes, it technically opposes the law, but the challenge was much greater than that. It was crazy because the record industry was printing money, like we were giving them a hand.
I also think that from a hacker’s point of view, the 2000s were a very decadent decade for American pop culture. The super decadent music videos were completely showing the money, the fancy cars, the champagne bottles, all of that creating this symbol for other people in Shelby and around the country think, “Oh, that’s what happens when you get a hit record or a hit song. That’s how they live. This has been promoted. It’s also the time of The Apprentice and Donald Trump and money. “, money, money, money. I mean, it’s not that we’re absolutely out of this, but it’s definitely a very 2000s thing.
I know for a fact that those pirates. . . They were very young, teenagers in their early twenties, and I don’t really think they understood that what they were doing was so detrimental to the company. They were completely indiferentes. de the music industry. What they didn’t realize was that at a time when the music industry was at its lowest point, the façade of what was being broadcast there wasn’t real. In the music business, in the corporate environment of the music business, when they started to go bankrupt, a lot of other people who were just assistants, copywriters in the structures industry, junior executives, receptionists, assistants, and all kinds of people in the ecosystem lost their jobs.
We now live in a culture and a world in which we have witnessed, from 2008 onwards, the collapse of some corporations and the effect this has had on people.
I think the general American public can perceive that a CEO is different from the average employee of a company. I think we are smarter as a network to perceive that. But at that moment I thought, “Oh, all those other people have cash and they all live in New York and Los Angeles. »
Witt: It’s amazing to think about what they were doing, which essentially filled the technological void that the record industry refused to fill, right?The record industry didn’t expand the generation that would succeed the compact disc because it was simply too successful for them. Instead, an organization of random teenagers built the next generation on their own, and yes, it caused a lot of damage. But I don’t think teenagers were necessarily looking to hurt anyone.
McIntyre: No.
Witt: They weren’t malicious. They were just fascinated by how those things worked. And, of course, they were also absolutely fascinated by the fame of the musicians themselves.
McIntyre: Was it difficult to get the other people from Shelby and those pirates to come down, show their faces and names and communicate what they did?
Witt: When I contacted them, many of them wanted to communicate. They were traumatized by their experience with the FBI, I would say, and they wanted this story to come out. I was surprised by his receptivity. Now some didn’t need to communicate at all. Some other people said, “I never need to talk about that time in my life. “”But it’s good. Enough is enough.
The FBI had prosecuted over a hundred other people, so there was enough information to report. Beyond that, Del was very open from the beginning. It was actually easy. I think he knew that something really ordinary had happened to him, that had shocked the world. I think he wanted other people to know that, and that was his motivation.
McIntyre: I was also surprised to see someone like Eminem sit down and talk about this. He was very touched by it, however, he is in the same movie as other people who harm him and, in a way, protect what they did. How they did it? Is this verbal exchange going?
Stapleton: For Eminem and all the artists who participated, Timbaland 50, even Rhymefest, is bittersweet. They survived the storm. The careers of these artists did not end because of piracy. While for many other artists, it was like a failure in the release.
People fell into the abyss because the music industry was in decline, but for them they survived. I think they spent more than a decade literally angry because they didn’t perceive who the culprit really was. I think they thought the intention was much more nefarious. I think the biggest thing they didn’t realize was that the people, the hackers and all the kids who were on peer-to-peer sites and sharing the leaked music, we were all fans. All we were looking for was to listen to it and enjoy it, to be on the network and to be able to share it with your friends or teenage friends. in his twenties.
As Stephen said, it was not a bad intention. I think through the book, and then through the conversations and interviews, you’re able to humanize Del and the hackers and start to understand, “Oh, there’s a release error on our part. ” “.
There was a failure with the IRAA and with the other people I was assigned to, the labels, the big corporations that ran everything, they were the eight. They did not pay attention to the warnings. They weren’t hunting for red flags. It was a bit of pride, and the artists ended up suffering too.
When this happened, Metallica vs. Napster was the biggest debate, right?It was like the OJ Simpson trial, and everyone had an opinion about it if you were young and a music lover. I feel that this debate was very two-dimensional. And that’s unfortunate because on the artist’s side, the concentrate just became: well, you have a lot of money, but it was so much more than that. It wasn’t Metallica who was only talking about Metallica. It was Metallica who was also looking to protect her tribe from other musicians.
As a filmmaker, if the first cut of my film, shared only with my editors and producers and very private, were to leak on the internet, I would die. It would mortify me, because it is an incomplete product. When you create something, you need it to [show that] you’re smart in what you do, you’re passionate about what you do, you need it to be the most productive product imaginable to offer your fans. It’s like this more productive typhoon from all those other angles. And it depends on where you are in the story to understand what your opinion is about it.
Thanks to the way Stephen wrote the book, it helped me to be able to edit this film. You have the possibility to sit in each chair and perceive what everyone was thinking and feeling.
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