I got lucky with my publisher, too. At Viking Press, Allison Lorentzen took a huge chance on me, and later graciously entertained my desire to read the entire manuscript to her out loud, sacrificing her weekend in service of my neurosis. She’s a great editor. The rest of team at Viking are great, too: Diego Nunez, Min Lee, Jason Ramirez, Nicholas LoVecchio, Lydia Hirt, Sarah Janet, Lindsay Prevette, Whitney Peeling, Andrea Schulz, Brian Tart, Clare Ferraro, and Catherine Boyd. Across the pond at Bodley Head, Stuart Williams, Vanessa Milton, Kirsty Howarth, Joe Pickering, David Bond, and James Paul Jones were all terrific. (I especially enjoyed the UK libel read. Let’s do it again sometime.) And I can’t forget my fact-checkers, Jill Malter and Dacus Thompson, who were forced to wade through thousands of pages of notes and to remind me on repeated occasions that no, Charlotte is not the capital of North Carolina. Additional fact-checking work was done by Lev Mendes at The New Yorker, where editors Willing Davidson and David Remnick were kind enough to publish an excerpt of this book.
It’s not always easy having a writer as a friend. Actually it sucks, so I’d like to publicly acknowledge those people close to me who listened (or at least pretended to listen) to me complain about this project over the years: Robin Respaut, Dustin Kimmel, Josh Morgenstern, David Graffunder, Elliot Ross, Brian and Kimberly Barber, Laura Griffin, Daryl Stein, Dan D’Addario, Pete Beatty, Bryan Joiner, Lisa Kingery, Dan Duray, Brian and Kristy Burlingame, Bernardo de Sousa e Silva, Lauren and Rui Mesquita, Jamie Roberts, Beverly Liang, Atossa Abrahamian, and Jihae Hong. Extra-special thanks go to my spirit brother Daniel Kingery, for nearly two decades of love and friendship. And extra-extra-special thanks go to Amanda Wirth, without whose patience, kindness, and support this book would never have been written.
Lastly, there is my family. Here I am luckiest of all. My father, Leonard Witt, was himself a journalist for many years, and has always encouraged me to write. My mother, Diana Witt, is a librarian by training, and she even compiled the index for this book. But it was my sister, Emily Witt, who really showed me the whole thing was possible. She’s a great reporter, an original thinker, and one of my favorite living writers. She will forever be an inspiration to me.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
A private detective once explained to me the essence of the investigative method: “You start with a document. Then you take that document to a person, and ask them about it. Then that person tells you about another document. You repeat this process until you run out of people, or documents.” Starting with the Affinity e-zine interview quoted in this book, and following this iterative process for the next four years, I ended up with dozens of people and tens of thousands of documents. A comprehensive catalog would take pages—below is a selection.
The key interview subjects for this book were Karlheinz Brandenburg, Robert Buchanan, Brad Buckles, Leonardo Chiariglione, Ernst Eberlein, Keith P. Ellison, Frank Foti, Harvey Geller, Bennie Lydell Glover, Bennie Glover, Jr., Loretta Glover, Iain Grant, Tom Grasso, Bernhard Grill, Bruce Hack, Jürgen Herre, Bruce Huckfeldt, James Johnston, Larry Kenswil, Carlos Linares, Henri Linde, Doug Morris, George Murphy, Tyler Newby, Harald Popp, Eileen Richardson, Domingo Rivera, Hilary Rosen, Johnny Ryan, Patrick Saunders, Dieter Seitzer, Jacob Stahler, Alex Stein, Simon Tai, Steve Van Buren, Terry Yates, and Elizabeth Young.
The list of documents is longer. The annual reports of Fraunhofer IIS were supplemented by the Institute’s own record keeping, particularly their documentary website on the history of the mp3, and their short video interviews with early mp3 team participants. Additional historical perspective on the mp3 story was provided by Telos Systems, and the “official” mp3 story was supplemented by reports and press releases from MPEG, ISO, AES, and various patent offices, with Leonardo Chiariglione’s MPEG archive at Chiariglione.net being a critical resource. Early demonstration versions of L3Enc, Winplay3, and other historical software from the mid-’90s were sourced from various underground sites. (Many times, the pirates ended up being the best archivists.)
The reporting on the structure and nature of the Scene relied heavily on court documents, testimony transcripts, and evidence submitted by the Department of Justice during the prosecutions of various warez groups, particularly RNS, APC, and RiSC-ISO. Supplementing this was the FBI’s heavily redacted case file on the Patrick Saunders investigation, obtained by Saunders himself under the Freedom of Information Act. The documentary record of the official court system was matched—and sometimes exceeded—by the shadow bureaucracy of the Scene itself. Various dupecheck sites and leaked databases provided millions of NFO files, but it wasn’t until Tony Söderberg’s creation of Srrdb.com that these found a centralized home. The tireless work of other Internet historians proved invaluable as well, particularly that of Jason Scott and the rest of the team at the Internet Archive.
Reporting on the life and history of Dell Glover comes from a series of ten interviews I conducted with him, on the phone and in person, over the course of nearly three years. I corroborated the details of his story with historical photographs, court testimony, DOJ evidence, clemency letters written by his friends, family, and neighbors, Facebook posts, corporate records from Vivendi Universal and Glenayre, arrest records from the Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office, and on-site visits to the Kings Mountain plant. Details of the leaked CDs were cross-referenced against RNS NFOs, and checked, when possible, with the physical evidence of the discs themselves—he still has them.
Reporting on the rise and fall of Oink’s Pink Palace relied heavily on my own experiences as a user of the site, as well as my participation in the broader private tracker underground (undertaken for research purposes only, of course). My personal background was supplemented by evidence, testimony, and court documents from the European torrent trials, particularly the UK’s prosecution of Alan Ellis and Sweden’s prosecutions of the founders of the Pirate Bay. Historical information about the sites was also provided by the terrific reporting at torrentfreak.com, and several documentary films, particularly TPB:AFK, helped shape my understanding of this world.
Details of the ups and downs of the music industry came from sales figures provided by Billboard, the RIAA, and the IFPI, supplemented by several decades of corporate filings from Warner Music Group (in various incarnations), MCA, Seagram, Apple, Sony, and Vivendi Universal. Additional perspective came from industry analyses produced by Bain & Company, the Nielsen Company, the Institute for Policy Innovation, Townsend-Greenspan & Co., and the now-deceased U.S. Office of Technology Assessment. Evidence of wrongdoing in the music industry, specifically compact disc price-fixing and industry payola, comes from both the Federal Trade Commission and the New York State Attorney General’s Office. Information about the RIAA’s structure, funding, and decision-making process comes from public tax documents, interviews, trial testimony, and evidence submitted in numerous civil court cases. For the lives of the musicians themselves, I relied on a wide variety of trade publications and video sources, but I would like to single out Adam Bhala Lough’s 2009 Lil Wayne documentary, The Carter, for praise.
The reporting on Doug Morris’ career, earnings, and assets relied on corporate filings and public records, supplemented by various public appearances he has given over the years, particularly his 2007 appearance on PBS’ CEO Exchange and his 2013 keynote lecture at Oxford Business School. Getty Images’ archive of 2,203 candid party shots of Morris also provided context, as did his 2007 congressional testimony defending the content of rap lyrics. Naturally, Morris’ incredible career had already attracted a fair amount of media coverage, and here I am indebted to the work of other journalists, especially regarding the frenzied reorganization of the music industry in 1995. While I tried wherever possible to supplement their efforts with my own research, there is no substitute for timely, original reporting. In particular, I relied on prior work from James Bates, Connie Bruck, Dan Charnas, Fredric Dannen, Fred Goodman, Robert Greenfield, Walter Isaacson, Steve Knopper, Mark Landler, Joseph Menn, Seth Mnookin, and Chuck Philips. The more I researched Morris’ life, the more impressed I was by the skill and investigative tenacity of the “old guard” of newspaper and magazine reporters. Let’s keep this tradition alive.