How Music Got Free (3 page)

After Stockholm the team waited for months for a ruling from MPEG. In October 1990, Germany was reunified, and Grill kept himself busy by applying Brandenburg’s algorithm to his new favorite song: the Scorpions’ “Wind of Change.” In November, Eberhard Zwicker, hearing researcher and table tennis enthusiast, passed away at the age of 66. In January 1991, the Fraunhofer team rolled out its first commercial product, a 25-pound hardware rack for broadcast transmission. It made an early sale to the bus shelters of a reunified Berlin.

Finally,
MPEG approached Fraunhofer with a compromise. The committee would make multiple endorsements. Fraunhofer would be included, but only if they agreed to play by certain rules, dictated by MUSICAM. In particular, they would have to adopt a gangrenous piece of proprietary technology called a “polyphase quadrature filter bank.” Four uglier words did not exist. Some kind of filter bank was necessary—this was the technology that split sound into component
frequencies, the same way a prism did to light. But the Fraunhofer team already had its own filter bank, which worked fine. Adding another would double the complexity of the algorithm, with no increase in sound quality. Worse, Philips had a patent on the code, which meant giving an economic stake in Fraunhofer’s project to its primary competitor. After a long and heated internal debate, Brandenburg finally agreed to this compromise, as he didn’t see a way forward without MPEG’s endorsement. But to others on the project, it looked like Fraunhofer had been fleeced.

In April 1991, MPEG made its endorsements public. Of the 14 original contenders, three methods would survive. The first was termed Moving Picture Experts Group, Audio Layer I, a compression method optimized for digital cassette tape that was obsolete practically the moment the press release was distributed. Then, with a naming scheme that could only have come from a committee of engineers, MPEG announced the other two methods: MUSICAM’s method, which would henceforth be known as the Moving Picture Experts Group, Audio Layer II—better known today as the mp2—and Brandenburg’s method, which would henceforth be known as the Moving Picture Experts Group, Audio Layer III—
better known today as the mp3.

Seeking to create a unified framework for collaboration, MPEG had instead sparked a format war. The mp3 had the technical edge, but the mp2 had name recognition and deeper corporate backing. The MUSICAM group was really just a proxy for Philips, and Philips was visionary. The company was making a fortune in licensing from the compact disc, but already, in 1990, with CD sales just starting to outpace vinyl, it was looking to control the market for its eventual replacement.

This farsighted strategic planning was complemented by a certain gift for low cunning. By this time, both Brandenburg and Grill were beginning to suspect that the suits at Philips were influencing MPEG’s decisions by lobbying behind the scenes. Johnston, the American,
shared these suspicions of favoritism, and scoffed at the ridiculous three-tiered “layer” scheme, a last-minute rule change MPEG had made only when its favored team looked likely to lose. Brandenburg, Grill, and Johnston all used the same word to describe this emergent phenomenon: “politics”—a hateful state of affairs in which personal relationships and business considerations trumped raw scientific data.

MPEG defended its decisions and denied any allegations of bias. MUSICAM researchers were indignant at the suggestion. 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. From Edison to Sony, the spoils were won by those who not only promoted their own standard, but who cleverly undermined the competition. There was a reason they called it a format “war.”

The Fraunhofer team, consisting of young, naive academics, were unprepared for such a battle. Over the next few years, in five straight head-to-head competitions, they got swept. Standardization committees chose the mp2 for digital FM radio, for interactive CD-ROMs, for Video Compact Disc (the predecessor to the DVD), for Digital Audio Tape, and for the soundtrack to over-the-air HDTV broadcasting. They chose the mp3 for nothing.

In discussions with other engineers, the team kept hearing the same criticism: that the mp3 was “too complicated.” In other words, it ate up too much computer processing power for what it spit out. The problem could be traced to Philips’ baneful filter bank. Half of the “work” the mp3 did was just getting around it. In the engineering schematics explaining mp3 technology, the flowchart showed how Brandenburg’s algorithm sidestepped the filter bank entirely,
like a detour around a car crash.

The Fraunhofer team began to see how they’d been outmaneuvered. Philips had convinced Fraunhofer to adopt its own inefficient methodology, then pointed to this exact inefficiency to sink them with the standards committees. Worse, engineers there seemed to
have started a whisper campaign, to spread the word about these failures to the audio engineering community at large. It was a commendable piece of corporate sabotage. They’d tricked Fraunhofer into wearing an ugly dress to the pageant, then made fun of them behind their backs.

But Brandenburg was not one to cry in the corner—ugly dress or not, he was determined to win. In July 1993, he was given a Fraunhofer directorship. Though he had zero business experience and was fighting from a losing position, he drove his team at all hours. Around this time a gang of thieves broke into the Erlangen campus in the middle of the night, making off with tens of thousands of dollars in computing equipment. Every division was hit, save for the floor that housed audio research. There, at some dead hour of the night, long after everyone else had gone home, two mp3 researchers were still in the listening lab, deaf to the world in their expensive Japanese headphones.

This dedication brought results. By 1994, the mp3 offered substantial improvements in audio quality over the mp2, although it still took slightly longer to encode. Even at the aggressive 12 to 1 compression ratio, the mp3 sounded decent, if not quite stereo quality. Twelve years after a patent examiner had told Seitzer it was impossible, the ability to stream music over digital phone lines was nearly at hand. Plus, there was the growing home PC market, and the prospect of locally stored mp3 media applications.

They just had to make it that far. In early 1995, the mp2 again beat the mp3 in a standards competition, this time for a massive market: the audio track for the home DVD player. Having watched Brandenburg’s team go zero for six, the budget directors at Fraunhofer were starting to ask hard questions. Like: why haven’t you won a standards competition yet? And: why do you have fewer than 100 customers? And: do you think perhaps we could borrow some of your engineers for a different project? And: remind me again why the German taxpayer has sunk millions of deutsche marks into this idea?

So in the spring of 1995, when Fraunhofer entered its final competition, for a subset of multicast frequencies on the European radio band, winning was everything. This was a small market, certainly, but one that would provide enough revenue to keep the team together. And for once there was reason for optimism: the group’s meetings rotated through its membership base, and this time Fraunhofer was scheduled to host. They’d be on home turf, and the final decision on the mp3 would be hashed out in a conference room just down the hall from the laboratory where, seven years earlier, the work on the piccolo had begun.

For months in advance, the broadcasting group strung Fraunhofer along. They promised to revisit the decisions of the past and encouraged them to continue the development of the mp3. They welcomed Brandenburg’s presence in committee meetings and told him they understood the funding difficulties his team was facing. They urged him to hold on just a little bit longer. In advance of the meeting, the committee’s specialized audio subgroup even formally recommended the adoption of the mp3.

Still, Brandenburg wanted nothing left to chance. He put together an engineering document that comprehensively debunked the complexity myth. Fifty pages long, it included a chart showing how, for the past five years, processing speed had outpaced bandwidth gains, just as he had predicted.

The meeting began late in the morning. The conference room in Erlangen was small and the working group was large, so Grill and the other nonpresenting members of the team had to wait outside. Brandenburg was optimistic as he took his seat. He distributed bound copies of his fifty-page presentation, then worked through his talking points with quiet precision. The mp3 could encode higher-quality sound with less data, he said. When planning standards, it was important to look to the future, he said. Computer processing speed would catch up with the algorithm, he said. The complexity argument was a myth, he said. Throughout, he referred to the presentation.

When he was done, it was MUSICAM’s turn. They handed out a presentation, too. It was two pages long. Their spiel was equally brief: a slick reminder of the elegant simplicity of the mp2. Then the committee began its discussions.

Brandenburg quickly realized that, despite the subgroup’s official recommendation, the mp3 was guaranteed nothing. Deliberations continued for the next five hours. The talks grew acrimonious, and once again Brandenburg sensed behind-the-scenes machinations of a political nature. An increasingly agitated Grill repeatedly stopped by the conference room, then left to pace the hall with his colleagues. Finally, a representative from Philips took the floor. His argument was concise: two separate radio standards would lead to fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The whole point of standards was that you needed only one. After a subtle dig at the mp3’s processing power requirements, he concluded with a direct plea to the working group’s voting members: “Don’t destabilize the system.” Then the steering committee—in the interests of stability, presumably—
voted to abandon the mp3 forever.

This was the end. There was nothing left to hope for. MPEG had barred them from the video disc and the broadcasting committees had kicked them off the airwaves. In head-to-head competitions against the mp2, Fraunhofer was now zero for seven. The mp3 was Betamax.

Bernhard Grill was crushed. He had been working on this technology for the better part of a decade. Standing in the crowded conference room, his back against the wall, he considered challenging the ruling. He was emotional, and he knew that, once he began speaking, he might lose control and unleash an angry harangue, fueled by the pent-up frustration he felt toward this group of know-nothing corporate big shots who’d been stringing him along for years. Instead, he remained quiet.

Typisch Deutsch
, after all. Grill’s failure to speak up at this moment would haunt him for years to come. The budget vultures were smelling blood, and he knew that the mp3’s corporate underwriters would
now pull the plug. The German state was happy to sponsor a technology with a fighting chance, but now the format war was plainly lost. Grill was stubborn, and determined to go down swinging, but he foresaw tough conversations ahead: the abandonment of a dead-end project, the breakup of the team, the patronizing commiseration over years of work spent for nothing.

Karlheinz Brandenburg, too, was devastated. He had handled the previous losses with equanimity, but this time they’d let him get his hopes up. The Philips delegate hadn’t even made a real argument. He’d just exercised his political muscle, and that was it. The whole experience seemed sadistic, a deliberate attempt to crush his spirits. For years to come, when he talked of this meeting, the nervous smile would fade, his lips would tighten, and a distant look would appear upon his face.

Still, this was engineering, where verified results should by necessity triumph over human sentiment. After the meeting, Brandenburg gathered his team for a brief pep talk, during which—the forced smile having returned—he explained how the “standards” people had simply made a mistake. Again. The team was baffled by this upbeat attitude, but Brandenburg could point to a binder full of engineering data, full of double-blind tests, that consistently showed his technology was better. Political dickering aside, that was all that mattered. Some way, somehow, the mp3 had to win in the end. They just had to find someone to
listen.

O
n a Saturday morning later that same year, 1995, two men commuted to work at the
PolyGram compact disc manufacturing plant in Kings Mountain, North Carolina. They traveled in a black Jeep Grand Cherokee four-by-four with heavily tinted windows. The men were both part-timers at the plant, and their weekend gigs supplemented the income they earned from other jobs moving furniture and serving fast food. The passenger’s name was James Anthony Dockery, but everyone called him “Tony.” The driver’s name was Bennie Lydell Glover, but everyone called him “Dell.”

The men had met a few months earlier on the factory floor, where Dockery, a talker, had convinced Glover, a listener, to provide him with a standing ride to work. They both lived in Shelby, a small town of 15,000 people located about twenty minutes to the northwest. Glover was 21 years old. Dockery was 25. Neither man had graduated from college. Both were practicing Baptists. Neither had lived more than a few miles away from the place where he’d been born.

Glover was black, wore a chinstrap beard and a well-manicured fade, and dressed in T-shirts and blue jeans. His physique was wiry and muscular, and the corners of his mouth turned down into a grimace. His heavy eyelids gave his face a look of perpetual indifference, his body language was slow and deliberate, and there was a stillness to his presence that approached torpor. When he spoke, which wasn’t often, he would first take several moments to collect his thoughts. Then his voice emerged, extremely deep and drenched in the syrupy
tones of the small-town South, the medium of delivery for a pithy sentence, maybe less.

Dockery was white, with close-cropped sandy blond hair and bulbous, glassy eyes. He was shorter than Glover, and his weight vacillated between merely girthy and positively obese. He was a fast-talking jokester, emotional and volatile, and although he could be quick to anger, he tended to laugh as he cursed you out. He made his opinions available to anyone who would listen, and even to many who would not.

Arriving at the facility, Glover and Dockery turned down the service entrance. The plant itself could not quite be seen from the road—it was tucked away in a “holler,” the regional term for a narrow crinkle in the earth. They crested a ridge in the Cherokee and came down the hill to a sprawling, surprising vista: a factory facility the size of a small airport. The PolyGram plant had 300,000 square feet of floor space, and its parking lot could hold 300 cars. Long-haul trucks were directed around back, where they were loaded with freshly pressed discs for distribution across the Eastern Seaboard. At night the parking lots were floodlit, and at all hours the main building buzzed with the promise of electric machinery. Even so, the plant retained something of the bucolic nature of the surrounding countryside. Its perimeter was abutted by forest, and the parking lots were occasionally invaded by rafters of wild turkeys.

The men found a parking spot, negotiating through hundreds of other cars in the midst of a shift change, and entered the factory by way of the cafeteria. Once inside, they made their way to a checkpoint, where employees were required to show their IDs and check their bags. Only a fixed number of workers could participate in a shift, so each man had to wait for another employee to clock out before he could clock in. As a security precaution, entering and exiting employees were not permitted to make physical contact. Once Glover and Dockery were officially on the books, they entered the factory proper. There, nine production lines, arranged in parallel, stretched
hundreds of feet across the floor. Each line employed a dozen workers in a choreographed sequence of high-efficiency manufacturing.

The compact disc manufacturing process started with a digital master tape, transported from the studio under heavy security. This tape was cloned in a clean room using a glass production mold, then locked away in a secure room. Next, the replication process began, as virgin discs were stamped with the production mold into bit-perfect copies. After replication, the discs were lacquered and sent to packaging, where they were “married” to the jewel cases, then combined with liner notes, inlays, booklets, and any other promotional materials. Certain discs contained explicit lyrics, and required a “Parental Advisory” warning sticker, and this was often applied by hand. Once finished, the packaged discs were fed into a shrink-wrapper, stacked into a cardboard box, and taken to inventory to await distribution to the music-purchasing public. New albums were released in record stores every Tuesday, but they needed to be finished—pressed, packaged, and shrink-wrapped—at the PolyGram plant weeks in advance.

On a busy day, the plant could produce a quarter million compact discs. Six hundred people were employed there, and the plant ran shifts around the clock every day of the year. Most were permanent workers, but to handle high-volume runs the plant relied on temps like Dockery and Glover. The two were at the very bottom of the plant’s organizational hierarchy. They were unskilled temporary laborers who worked the opposite ends of a shrink-wrapper. Glover was a “dropper”: wearing surgical gloves, he fed the married, stickered discs into the gaping maw of the machine. Dockery was a “boxer”: he took the shrink-wrapped discs off the other end of the belt and stacked them into a cardboard box. The jobs paid ten dollars an hour.

Amidst this drudgery, Glover and Dockery soon became friends. Dockery, clownish and extroverted, provided Glover with amusement. Glover, taciturn and diligent, provided Dockery with a ride. Despite appearances, the men had much in common. They liked the
same music. They made the same money. They knew many of the same people. Most of all, they were fascinated by computers.

This was an unusual proclivity for two working-class Carolinians in the early 1990s—the average Shelbyite was more likely to own a hunting rifle than a PC. But Glover and Dockery were ahead of the curve. Their computers both had modems, and they had begun to experiment with bulletin board systems and the nascent culture of the Internet. In 1995, the online world was still largely a fragmented archipelago of homegrown servers, most of which couldn’t talk to one another. Like the Galápagos, the bulletin boards were isolated islands that developed distinct vocabularies and cultures, and you connected to them by dialing a phone number you got from the back of the newspaper.

Glover’s interest in technology was inherited. His father had been a mechanic. His grandfather, a farmer, had moonlit as a television repairman. Glover, born in 1974, was their namesake, and they called him Dell to avoid confusion with the two other Bennie Glovers around the house. Things had been hard for his forebears: their lives were defined by the era of “colored” discrimination that Dell had only narrowly missed. In a time of entrenched, endemic racism, the elder Glovers had carved out niches as “tinkerers,” capable men who could fix anything from a blown vacuum tube to a busted gasket.

As a child, Dell had expressed an indefatigable interest in cars, motorbikes, radios, televisions, and anything else with engines or circuitry. He relentlessly sought to understand how machinery worked, taking it apart and reassembling it over and over again. His father, himself a quiet, practical man, had encouraged these interests. Dell remembered fondly his first ride on a tractor, followed by a terse discussion of how the machine worked and what each part did.

At the age of 15, Dell purchased his first computer. His mother was there with him in the electronics department at Sears. The year was 1989, a time when the PC was still the domain of hobbyists. The Sears catalog from that year outlined the specs of a typical machine:
2 megabytes of RAM, a 28-megabyte internal hard drive, a one-color monitor, and two 5.25-inch floppy disk drives. The total cost ran to $2,300, a purchase perhaps better understood in contemporary, inflation-adjusted terms: Glover had paid the equivalent of $4,000 for a 20-pound box with less computing power than a low-end cell phone.

He didn’t have the cash up front, so Sears offered him an installment plan, with his mother as cosignatory. To make the payments, he took a summer job as a dishwasher at Shoney’s. When school started that year, he continued to work, commuting directly from campus to the restaurant and working until eleven at night, every weekday, even Friday. His grades suffered and his overall interest in school declined, but Shoney’s management was impressed by this capable and tireless worker. By the time he graduated, he was running the kitchen.

Around this time, too, Glover’s nights became difficult. While sleeping, his breathing became constricted, and he would choke or snort, and then awake with a start. On a bad night this could happen several times in an hour. Glover’s sleep apnea was a chronic, undiagnosed condition that made his days groggy and his nights unbearable. It was a contributing factor to the grueling routine that he stuck with into his 40s: 12 hours of work, followed by some free time on the computer, followed by four or five hours of troubled, restless sleep. On weekends he went bowling.

After graduation, and following an indifferent stint at community college, Glover began to look for full-time employment. Food service was out. Shoney’s was a grease trap, and Glover was tired of smelling like fryer oil. But he walked away from the job having learned a valuable lesson: if you worked hard, you got a promotion. For the next two years Glover moved furniture, and supplemented his income with a succession of low-wage rotations from a temp agency. In 1994, he was placed in a long-term engagement working weekends at the PolyGram plant.

PolyGram.
The name and the job had piqued Glover’s interest. He knew the company as a music label, but wasn’t familiar with its roster.
In time, he would come to learn that PolyGram was just a division of a much larger corporate entity: Philips, the consumer electronics giant headquartered in Holland, the co-inventors of the compact disc. In addition to being a digital enthusiast, Glover was an avid music consumer, and he was fascinated by compact disc technology. He’d recently made the transition from tapes to CDs, and a few months earlier he had even purchased a used player with the express intention of taking it apart. He had taken inventory of the component parts: a mechanical drive, a headphone jack, the standard array of circuitry, and a small consumer-grade laser. The discs themselves contained a series of microscopic grooves, representing a series of ones and zeros. The laser fired its beam at the grooves and bounced back the information to a sensor. Then the circuitry translated that information into an electrical impulse, which was sent to a speaker, completing the transformation from digital signals on plastic to analog vibrations in the air.

On his first day at the plant, Glover was presented with the standard battery of workplace paperwork. Among these documents was PolyGram’s “No Theft Tolerated” standard, which barred the unauthorized removal of unreleased compact discs, under threat of termination. The terms of this standard were broad, and extended to unauthorized duplication and “conspiring with others.” Glover signed, dated, and initialed this document, and it was placed in his employee file. Then he was led to the factory floor.

It soon became clear that PolyGram wasn’t employing him for his technical skills. Anyone could be a dropper. Feeding jewel cases into a shrink-wrapper required neither skill nor work ethic, only a heroic resistance to boredom. Occasionally, Glover was tasked with applying the “Parental Advisory” warning stickers by hand, and that was the closest the job ever came to fun. Still, he saw the potential for advancement. Several of the plant’s permanent employees had started out as temps, and some now even worked in management. There was some kind of future here, maybe as a technician, maybe as an overseer.
Reaching those heights required only dedication, and the lessons of Shoney’s applied.

In fact, opportunities for advancement were everywhere. The Baptist backwoods of the Carolina foothills were transforming into America’s fastest-growing industrial corridor. In most of the country manufacturing jobs were vanishing, as work was automated or outsourced to Latin America and Asia. But in the Southeast United States the reverse was happening, as favorable tax rates, cheap land, and an antipathy toward organized labor attracted the attention of multinational corporations. In 1993, BMW had opened its
first ever automobile factory outside of Germany: not in China, nor Mexico, but Spartanburg, South Carolina, just across the state line from Glover’s hometown. Dozens of other multinationals had followed, including the Dutch conglomerate Philips that had hired Glover. The Carolinas were changing.

Glover’s hometown of Shelby was changing too. The seat of Cleveland County had for decades been a sleepy holdover from the bad old days of the rural South. The town square abutted the train depot, and south of it the main road led past a tony array of colonnaded mansions. Across the highway,
property values plummeted, following a predictable pattern of racial segregation. Divided by race and geography, the town’s population remained united by religious denomination. More than two dozen Baptist churches ministered to Shelby, and in summer outdoor faith healings and tent revivals were a common sight.

All of this was now being paved over. Shelby’s new “downtown” was a long string of cookie-cutter corporate franchises along either side of Highway 74. There was a Wal-Mart, a movie theater, a strip mall, a Chick-fil-A, another strip mall, a Bojangles’, and a megamall. The stores were arranged in a single-file line, which even in a town as small as Shelby tended to create traffic problems. They were all surrounded by high-capacity parking lots.

Car culture, the great equalizer of American life, was on the rise
again. Rank, status, and style were displayed via the vehicle one drove and the accoutrements one added to it. The price of gasoline was the topic of endless discussion, comparison, and speculation among Shelbyites—they talked about it the way New Yorkers talked about their rent. This clogged, anonymous strip of highway was now the center of Shelby’s social and cultural life.

Such as it was. Glover liked his hometown, but he was the first to admit that life there could be terribly boring. On weekends, he headed to Charlotte, North Carolina’s largest city, located about an hour’s drive east of Shelby. There he found excitement at Club Baha, or Club 2000, or any of Charlotte’s other half dozen dance floors, where promoters and DJs spun hip-hop records to raucous, racially mixed crowds. There was energy to the nightlife there, spurred on by a recent reinvention of the popular sound. Radio-friendly bubblegum was out; hard-edged gangster rap was in. Glover fast became a Charlotte fixture, sometimes accompanied by Dockery. Young and handsome, with a deep voice and an affected nonchalance, Glover was generally successful with women. Dockery was not.