NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1,500 gigabytes of music, nearly 15,000 albums worth As I moved toward higher-quality files from private torrent sites, the albums took up more space than typical downloads.
a secret database that tracked thirty years of leaks Specifically, a database of Scene NFOs stretching back to 1982.
using forensic data analysis Different Scene releasing groups and torrent sites used different specifications for preferred bit rates and encoders over the years. By comparing these specifications with embedded ID3 metadata in the file, it is possible to get a general sense of an mp3’s time and place of origin.
CHAPTER 1
“He’s very good at math . . .” All quotes from Fraunhofer colleagues. The last is from Seitzer.
liminal contours of human perception For details, see Eberhard Zwicker and Richard Feldtkeller, The Ear as a Communication Receiver (Acoustical Society of America, 1999).
“Perfect Sound Forever” Philips’ tagline for its demonstration 1982 compact disc was “Pure, Perfect Sound Forever.” The disc contained tracks by Elton John, Dire Straits, and the Dutch Swing College Band.
one-twelfth their original size Digital information is stored in binary units of zero or one, and each individual value is referred to as a “bit.” The bit rate of CD audio is 1,411.2 kilobits per second (kbps)—in other words, it requires 1,411,200 of these bits to store one second of stereo sound. Germany’s first digital phone lines transmitted data at 128 kbps—in other words, they could transmit 128,000 of these bits per second. Thus the CD audio specification was 11.025 times larger than the capacity of the data pipe. With the conservative touch of the engineer, Seitzer rounded this number up.
the compression algorithm could target different output sizes Technically, Brandenburg’s algorithm made multiple passes on the source audio until the desired bit rate was achieved. With each pass the information was simplified, and fewer bits were used. A 128-kbps mp3 took more passes to create than a 256-kbps mp3, and thus its audio quality was lower.
Johnston was the Newton to Brandenburg’s Leibniz Like Newton, Johnston claimed he had got there first and, with a somewhat churlish touch, would tell of a public presentation he’d given in Toronto in 1984 in which he’d outlined concepts in perceptual coding that predated Brandenburg’s work by nearly two years. But AT&T hadn’t understood the value of Johnston’s research, and Brandenburg had filed his patent first.
MPEG . . . decides which technology makes it to the consumer marketplace MPEG is perhaps the world’s strangest standardization committee. Its continued existence depends almost entirely on the work of a single person: an eccentric Italian engineer by the name of Leonardo Chiariglione. Despite volunteering more than 10,000 hours of his life managing the organization for the last 25 years, Chiariglione lays claim to none of its patents and has never earned any money for his work. He describes his motivation in almost metaphysical terms: “MPEG is the bridge between the human and the rest of the world.”
The Stockholm contest was to be graded A technical description of the format and results of the Stockholm contest can be found in “MPEG/Audio Subjective Assessments Test Report,” International Organization for Standardization, 1990.
MPEG approached Fraunhofer with a compromise In addition to the MPEG deal, Fraunhofer made engineering concessions to please Thomson and AT&T. The final piece of technology took a variety of sound-sampling and compression methods and bound them together with the computing equivalent of masking tape. James Johnston, who despite his grumpy, plainspoken manner, was careful never to swear, thus described the mp3 as “A hybrid. Or maybe an impolite word for an illegitimate child.”
better known today as the mp3 The name “mp3” was not widely used until the introduction of Windows 95. During the period after the MPEG announcement, the mp3 was referred to as “Layer 3.” Although anachronistic, from here on I refer to it as the mp3 for clarity.
like a detour around a car crash See, for example, Karlheinz Brandenburg, “MP3 and AAC Explained,” paper presented at the AES 17th International Conference on High Quality Audio Coding, Signa, Italy, September 2–5, 1999.
voted to abandon the mp3 forever The final official decision of the European Digital Audio Broadcasting standard was filed May 1995.
CHAPTER 2
PolyGram compact disc manufacturing plant in Kings Mountain, North Carolina The property lot of the plant is technically in Grover, North Carolina. However, all of the former plant employees I spoke with referred to it only as the Kings Mountain plant.
first ever automobile factory outside of Germany BMW had manufactured parts outside of Germany before, but the Spartanburg plant was the first complete production line.
property values plummeted, following a predictable pattern of racial segregation Author’s impressions, confirmed by real estate website Zillow.
CHAPTER 3
company car, a personal chauffeur . . . ten million dollars Mark Landler, “The Perks of a Music Man,” New York Times, July 10, 1995.
more Bobby Darin than Bob Dylan Chuck Philips, “Universal Music Chief’s Winding Comeback Trail,” Los Angeles Times, May 12, 1999. Morris’ quote reads: “Yeah. I was like a cross between Neil Sedaka and Bobby Darin. It sounds pretty wimpish now, but that’s what was happening in 1962.”
Ertegun was a legend For the classic treatment of Ertegun, see George W. S. Trow, “Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse,” New Yorker, May 29 and June 5, 1978.
a bonus of a million dollars Robert Greenfield, The Last Sultan: The Life and Times of Ahmet Ertegun (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 313.
long-standing ties to organized crime For more on this, see Fredric Dannen, Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business (New York: Vintage, 1990).
“We’re going to make more hits.” Morris interview. He has been telling this anecdote for years. See also Greenfield, Last Sultan, 313.
his appointment was regarded with skepticism See, for example, James Bates, “Music Maven: Doug Morris Has Set the Tone for the Dinosaur-to-Diva Rise of Atlantic,” Los Angeles Times, April 8, 1994. Morris is described as “someone who cooled his heels for years before finally getting his chance.”