Does what it says on the tin, to a point
director Alexandria Stapleton enlists executives and artists from Universal Music to tell the story of, well, how music got free. The results are often fascinating.functions as a Cliffs Notes of Witt’s narrative and really pushes the great-man theory of the beginning of mass file sharing.
She shows how the late 1990s warez scene started uploading CDs at a furious rate, something that caught the eye of RIAA CEO Hilary Rosen . Label heads were pissed off enough by the CDs that were being uploaded after going on sale, but they really started to lose their minds when stuff started appearing on the internet before the street date.
Turns out the weak leak in the security chain was at the manufacturing plant, particularly one in Shelby, NC. A self-taught computer savant and plant employee named Dell Glover started lifting CDs from the plant and uploading them to a warez scene crew called RNS; these crews became the rock upon which peer-to-peer sites such as Napster built their church, and the genie wasout of the bottle.
The racial algebra of all this becomes complicated fast: Glover and his pals in Shelby were Black, Southern and working-class, making very little money at the plant . The warez scene folks were all over the world and these MP3s were spread largely by middle-class college folks in their dorms. This was also a point where the pop charts were dominated by hip-hop: 50 Cent, Timbaland, Eminem, his manager Paul Rosenberg, and several Universal Music executives show up to explain their relative positions in all this, as well as a lot of the folks from the warez scene, some of whom ended up doing time for file sharing. It’s an interesting, entertaining look at an extremely volatile moment in time for the music business, not to mention a terrific ad for the book.
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