In the summer of 2001 he traveled to Hong Kong to give another lecture. Afterward he walked out onto the narrow streets of shops. There, behind glass, was the latest generation of mp3 players. A robust consumer market was emerging as the file-sharers tried to take their plunder mobile. Before him Brandenburg saw a collection of devices from more than ten manufacturers. In front of that was a faint reflection of himself. He had changed. His hair had retreated halfway up his head, revealing a glossy, pointed dome. He favored suits now, and dark shirts with clashing ties, though he’d kept the wooly beard, and the combined effect was not entirely professional. His eccentric body language remained, but he could rely on reputation rather than presence to command respect.
Finally, he accepted his victory. Grill, Popp, and the other members of the team had grasped the unshakeable market position of the mp3 years earlier, but Brandenburg was conservative, perhaps even skeptical of his own success. As a result he’d kept striving for market share, pushing hard on the accelerator long after the race had been won. Now, at last, he could ease off. He was no longer an academic researcher, but an experienced and successful businessman who understood the game as well as anyone alive. Old rivalries could be forgiven, as his former enemies were now his licensees. He bore no lasting animosity against MPEG, nor MUSICAM, nor even Philips. Sure, in the early days he’d been a newcomer, and they’d fleeced him, but with the benefit of distance, it almost seemed as if he approved of their cunning. Now, when he spoke of the filter bank that Philips had weaseled into his code, it was not with bitterness but a kind of wistful admiration.
They had been so smart; they had known so little; the list of errors was long. The MPEG compromise; the Erlangen debacle; the incredible failure to patent the handheld mp3 player, a decision that left hundreds of millions of dollars on the table. The canny operator who stood in front of the shop in Hong Kong would not have made those same mistakes. Not to say he was a shark—by all accounts Brandenburg was an honest person, and he conducted his professional dealings with integrity. Only to suggest he’d learned some things along the way, and that he no longer believed a binder full of superior engineering data was all you needed in this world to succeed.
CHAPTER 11
Although he was one of their best customers, for the longest time Dell Glover couldn’t figure out how the smugglers were getting the compact discs out of the plant. Under Van Buren, Universal’s security regime was watertight. In addition to the randomized search gauntlet, employees were now required to pass their bags on a conveyor belt through an X-ray machine. The plant had no windows and the emergency exits set off a loud alarm. Laptop computers were forbidden anywhere on the premises, as were stereos, portable players, boom boxes, or anything else that might accept and read a compact disc.
On the production line, the pressing machines were digitally controlled, and they generated error-proof records of their input and output. The finished shrink-wrapped discs were immediately logged into inventory with an automated bar code scanner. Management generated an automated report for every run, tracking what had been printed and what had actually shipped, and any difference had to be accounted for. For a popular album, the plant might now press over a half million copies in a single 24-hour period, but advanced digital record keeping permitted the bosses to track their inventory at the level of the individual disc.
Once a wrapped disc exited the production line, it was not touched again by human hands until it made it to the store. The boxed discs were glued shut, then put on shipping pallets by robots. Automated laser-guided vehicles then drove those pallets to the warehouse, where employee access was strictly controlled. Only the loading dock workers were permitted to handle the boxes past this point.
And then there was the gauntlet. On an average shift, one out of every five employees was selected, and Van Buren’s randomized search regime had already nabbed several would-be thieves. Occasionally even this was not enough. Every once in a while a marquee release would come through the plant—The Eminem Show, say, or Country Grammar. These desiderata arrived in a limousine with tinted windows, carried from the production studio in a briefcase by a courier who never let the master tape out of his sight. After the glass production mold was sourced from the master, the courier put the tape back in the briefcase and left as mysteriously as he had arrived. When one of these anticipated albums was pressed, Van Buren would order wandings for every employee in the plant, from the plant manager on down.
And yet somehow even the high-value discs were making their way out. Glover could usually have them in his hands within a couple of days. What was going on? Had someone bribed a guard? Had someone disabled the alarm on an emergency exit, or managed to slip the discs through a crack in the doors? Was someone perhaps standing outside in a blind spot between the cameras and tossing the discs like Frisbees over the fence?
Glover began to think about how he would do it. First, he would have to get the discs out of inventory control. In this respect his position on the packaging line was perfect. Further down the line and the discs would be bar-coded and shrink-wrapped and logged in inventory. Further up and he wouldn’t have access to the final product. The packaging line was the only place in the entire plant where employees made physical contact with the finished discs.
Even better, work on the packaging line was becoming time-consuming and complex. This was one of the early side effects of the mp3, which was sonically equivalent to the compact disc but in any number of other ways superior. The files weren’t just smaller and cheaper than compact disc audio, they were also infinitely reproducible and utterly indestructible. Compact discs got scratched and cracked and stolen at parties, but an mp3 was forever. The only advantage the compact disc offered, therefore, was the tactile satisfaction of physical ownership. At Universal, packaging was all they were really selling.
When Glover had started in 1994, the job had been mindless. All he’d had to do was put on his surgical gloves and run the jewel case through the shrink-wrapper—that was it. Now album art was becoming ornate. The discs themselves were gold or fluorescent, the jewel cases were colorized in opaque blue or purple, and the album sleeves were thick booklets printed on high-quality paper stock with complex folding instructions. At every step along the way, the increased complexity introduced opportunities for error, and there were now dozens, sometimes hundreds, of extra discs printed for every run. These discs were deliberate overstock, to be used as replacements in case anything was damaged or smudged during the packaging process.
At the end of each shift, protocol instructed that Glover bring the overstock discs to a plastics grinder, where they were destroyed. The grinder was a simple device: a refrigerator-sized machine painted Heavy Industry Blue with a feed slot in the front leading to a serrated metal cylinder. The discs were dumped in the slot, and the cylinder crushed them to shards. For years, Glover had stood and watched as thousands of perfectly good compact discs were destroyed in the gears of the machine. And, over time, he came to realize that he was staring into a black hole in the Universal security regime. The grinder was efficient, but it was far too simple. The machine had no memory and generated no records. It existed outside of the plant’s digital inventory management process. If you were instructed to destroy 24 overstock discs and only 23 actually made it into the feed slot, no one in accounting would ever know.