How Music Got Free Quotes

“In June 1999, an 18-year-old Northeastern University dropout by the name of Shawn Fanning debuted a new piece of software he had developed called Napster.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“Do you realize what you’ve done?” Adar asked Brandenburg after their first meeting. “You’ve killed the music industry!”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“It was a well-known problem in corporate America—performance targets were too often tied to short-term results.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free

“Despite forty years in the music business, he still never knew for certain which of his acts would succeed, and the Hollywood dictum that “Nobody knows anything” held equally true for every other type of show business. Every year hundreds of movies played to empty theaters; dozens of TV shows were commissioned and then killed after a few episodes; thousands of freshly printed books were remaindered and pulped. Perhaps the saying even held true for the corporate world at large, and those who embraced this uncomfortable state of Socratic ignorance were those who tended to survive.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“Most listeners didn’t care about quality, and the obsession with perfect sound forever was an early indicator that the music industry didn’t understand its customers.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“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.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“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.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“complement the first. The initial credit line Junior offered for investing in artists was only $100 million, much less than what had been available at Warner, but Morris could see that, sitting on a limitless tap of booze money, there was a lot more where that came from.4 Best of all, Seagram was domiciled in Canada, where the lyrics of popular rap songs were not a pressing political issue. Although Jimmy Iovine and Doug Morris were temporarily estranged as colleagues, they remained best friends and hoped to reunite. Fuchs’ actions had stung them both, and Iovine had raised such a stink after Morris’ sacking that he was no longer permitted in the Time Warner Building. Under normal circumstances, he too would have been fired, but Iovine didn’t actually work for Warner directly—he was an equity partner in a joint venture, and the only way to get rid of him was to sell him back his shares. This was an expensive proposition, as Interscope had diversified beyond rap, signing No Doubt, Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson. Together, the two came up with a plan. Iovine, the agitator, would make himself unbearable to Fuchs, and push extreme albums like Dogg Food and Antichrist Superstar that made the provocations of The Chronic seem boring by comparison. Morris,”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free

“TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard, directed by Simon Klose”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“He was the greatest music pirate of all time. He”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free

“Tupac's death was a senseless tragedy, but it was also a great career move.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy

“Wayne got weird.8 He grew out his dreads and covered his body with goonish tattoos. He smoked weed like it was his job and developed an addiction to codeine-based cough syrup. His voice became screwed up and froggy. His production turned psychedelic. In 2003, he’d been a skinny, unexceptional adolescent delivering basic-sounding rhymes over basic-sounding beats. By 2005, he had transformed himself into The Illustrated Man, and his auto-tuned music sounded like garbled transmissions from outer space.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free

“Universal was selling one out of three albums in the United States, and one out of four in the world. But it wasn’t enough: even as the music industry’s number one supplier, Universal’s overall top-line revenues had gone down. The compact disc was going obsolete, and the revenue streams that Steve Jobs had promised him from iTunes were failing to materialize. Digital sales of music accounted for 1 percent of Universal’s revenues in 2005.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free

“America Online, the company whose business model was to drown the earth in unsolicited junk mail CDs.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free

“While some of the files were indeed untraceable artifacts from random denizens of the Internet, the vast majority of pirated mp3s came from just a few organized releasing groups.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free

“Negative rates are a function of global abundance (brought on by technological advances), and a trend that cannot be stopped even by the strongest central bank . . . For rates to stay positive we have to hoard almost everything in the world from the people that need it, if it is to have value. The artificial scarcity tactics that have been used through the ages to achieve this are getting harder to execute because of technological liberation—which is enabling the emergence of collaborative economy which bypasses rates of return.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“Although in 2005 compact discs still represented over 98 percent of the market for legal album sales, Morris had no loyalty to the format. In May of that year, Vivendi Universal announced it was spinning off its CD manufacturing and distribution business into a calcified corporate shell called the Entertainment Distribution Company. Included in EDC’s assets were several massive warehouses and two large-scale compact disc manufacturing plants: one in Hanover, Germany, and one in Kings Mountain, North Carolina. Universal would still manufacture all its CDs at the plants, but now this would be an arms-length transaction that allowed them to watch the superannuation of optical media from a comfortable distance. It was one of the oldest moves in the corporate finance playbook: divest yourself of underperforming assets while holding on to the good stuff. EDC was a classic “stub company,” a dogshit collection of low-growth, capital-intensive factory equipment that was rapidly going obsolete. In other words, EDC was a drag on A that added little to B. Let the investment bankers figure out who wanted it—Universal had gone digital, and the death rattle of the compact disc had grown loud enough for even Doug Morris to hear. The CD was the past; the iPod was the future. People loved these stupid things. You could hardly go outside without getting run over by some dumb jogger rocking white headphones and a clip-on Shuffle. Apple stores were generating more sales per square foot than any business in the history of retail. The wrapped-up box with a sleek wafer-sized Nano inside was the most popular gift in the history of Christmas. Apple had created the most ubiquitous gadget in the history of stuff.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“Joseph Menn in his book All the Rave, the definitive account of Napster’s rise and”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“Bennett was a bloated neoconservative, a blithering culture warrior, and a major-league asshole.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“Within 48 hours of the raid that shut down Oink, two new sites had appeared: Waffles.fm and What.cd, both run by former Oink administrators.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“Universal had also been “Astroturfing”—hiring mercenary phone banks to call in to radio stations to request “hit” songs, creating an artificial appearance of demand where none existed.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“Anyone who had ever worked in a record store knew that Tuesdays were the busiest day, when the new releases hit the shelves.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“In fact, Apple pushed so aggressively for AAC that many users wrongly came to believe that the company had invented it, a misconception that would persist for years.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“As head of RNS, Kali was the gatekeeper to the distributed archive of secret “topsite” servers that formed the backbone of the Scene.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“In April 1997, Justin Frankel, a freshman student at the University of Utah, debuted Winamp, an mp3 player that offered several minor cosmetic improvements to WinPlay3, chiefly the ability to edit playlists.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“For the studio guys, sound was an aesthetic quality that you described in terms of “tone” and “warmth.” For the researchers, sound was a physical property of the universe that you described in logarithmic units of air displacement.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“had passed around floppy disks full of cracked shareware through the postal service.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“After some internal discussion, Brandenburg made an executive decision: to promote the mp3 standard, Fraunhofer would simply give L3Enc away. Thousands of floppy disks were made, and these were distributed at trade shows through late 1994 and early 1995. Brandenburg encouraged his team members to distribute the disks to friends, family, colleagues, and even competitors.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“Like Brandenburg and Grill, he didn’t trust MPEG, as he had seen these “impartial” standards committees make biased decisions before.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

“His personal favorite came from a visit to Boeing headquarters in Seattle, where, in the gift shop, he found a collection of audio samples from roaring jet engines.”
― Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention