This book was probably my favourite out of the four. I’m not entirely sure if that’s due to it’s relation to my own life(trust me, we’re gonna get into that down the line of the blog), or rather that the author, Witt, is a rather good story teller. You can tell from his tone of voice that Witt is biased towards certain perspectives of the story, and I’m rather glad he is, it gives a much more personable retelling of the events that transpire. Overall, the book is split into three perspectives. The corporate side(focusing mainly on Morris), the pirates end(focusing on Dell Glover), and lastly a misc. amount of narrative to piece the growth of technology/user interface throughout books history. I’d have to say that the start of the book was rather boring, and I can’t cite specifically when it picked up for me, but when it did, whew, I was a enamored. Again, as I did with the last book, I’m gonna pull out a series of quotes and use them to discuss my thoughts about the book.
“But for me, and those younger, collecting was effortless: the music was simply there. The only hard part was figuring out what to listen to.”(17)
So, when I was a kid, I firmly remember having a small MP3 player with some 20 songs on it. My mom showed me websites in which you could go to legally purchase music. Through this she taught me some basic components of the internet(don’t download things from just random sites), how to organize downloaded music, and budgeting(after all we were buying music so I could only choose my favourite 20 songs I could think of at the time). Anyways, I was always proud of my little collection of songs, but eventually I got bored and wanted more. Well my mom wouldn’t let me get more so I was kind of stuck in a rut for a small while. Meanwhile, there were many kids around me who had an excess amount of music either on their own MP3 players or, better yet, iPod Nanos. The most amusing thing I can remember is that these kids were quite adamant about the fact that all of the music on their devices was pirated. Not by them of course, but by their parents, in this nuanced attempt to save money. I always remember thinking that these kids were morally inept, but that of course was long before I was exposed to the sort of operations that my mother had set up on the ‘family desktop’ that was set up downstairs.
“My assumption had been that music piracy was a crowdsourced phenomenon. That is, I believed that the mp3s I’d downloaded had been sourced from scattered uploaders around the globe and that this diffuse network of rippers was not organized in any meaningful way”(18)
So, I never assumed the same for music, but I can definitely say that I always assumed it to be the case about movie torrenting. I’m only bringing this up because I’m rather curious if the phenomenon of movie torrenting follows the same command structures that music seemed to fall under. Hopefully my admittance of torrenting movies doesn’t shine a negative light upon my face, for I don’t mean it to. I love movies even more so than I love music. I find that sometimes, films aren’t accessible to me(looking at you foreign films), and that the only way to view them is by finding illegal copies of them upon the waves of the internet. Anyways, moving on.
“Where the sales literature promised “Perfect Sound Forever,” Seitzer saw a maximalist respository of irrelevant information, most of which was ignored by the human ear. He knew that most of the data from a compact disc could be discarded-the human auditory system was already doing it.”(26)
Nothing exceptional with this quote. I just thought it was an interesting note to make regarding data compression. Especially when you think of it in terms of Claude Shannon’s form of thinking. Shannon, I believe, would find this discovery phenomenal. The average person would scoff at the mention of erasing parts of the song, but that’s not really what’s going on. Yes content is getting cut from the songs, but it’s content that wasn’t be processed to begin with.
A=music that the human ear can detect
B=detectable music
C=not detectable music
Thus, wanting to save on space, you merely subtract the unwanted variable B in order to optimize on space within the equalization between C and A.
“Adar believed that in a few years you’d be able to download music directly over the Internet and dispense with the compact disc entirely. The hitch was that audio files were large, and would have to be compressed considerably for the approach to scale.”(87)
“The music industry feared that Adar’s digital jukebox would cannibalize physical music sales, and he’d spent the last two years being told no”…”The music industry wasn’t interested in streaming. It was married tot he compact disc, in sickness and in health.”(88)
No specific comments outside that: 1. I’m glad to know that many engineers were able to predict the innovation that was coming at the turn of the century. 2. I wonder if anyone, outside of Steve Jobs, was predicting the creation of DAW software such as garage band. Furthermore, if there’s one thing that this class has taught me, it’s that the music industry is pretty damn stubborn. Interestingly, but surprisingly, Witt kind of paints them, the businesses that run the music industry, as the bad guys in this real life tale of internet piracy. Case and point, stopping technological progress in order to capitalize on your own monopolized market is pretty distasteful in my book. The compact disk apparently was a ‘all the eggs in one basket’ for this industry that was on the verge of falling upon itself with the emergence of internet popularity.
“The scorpions were the obvious choice-or perhaps Suzanne Vega-but the team worried that encoding ‘Wind of Change’ or ‘Tom’s Diner’ to mp3 format might to infringe on the artists’ copyrights.'(91)
Yah, I’m glad to know that the laws of copyright were about as confusing/not defined as they are today.
Around 95-96, Witt talks about the mp3’s first website. He mentions that it basically flopped, but he’s makes an interesting comment about Apple that I found rather ironic. He says,
“The links offered versions of the L3Enc mp3 encoder for DOS, Windows, and Linux. Apple was not included-Bernhard Grill found the company’s programming environment cumbersome and their user interface patronizing.”(95-96)
I can’t help but appreciate that Witt is including this in the historical narrative. It almost seems amusing that there once was a point in time in which Apple didn’t seem to be dominating the marketplace. I have an important question(I don’t know if you have the answer for it particularly, but I’d like to hear your thoughts). If I make music on GarageBand and then sell it, do I have to give some sort of commission to Apple or is it solely considered my property?
Around 99-100, Witt provides insight regarding the fact that Glover had purchased a CD burner. Now, I have a couple of questions that Witt doesn’t really dwelve into, and again, if you have any insight, let me know. Firstly, why aren’t burners illegal? I discussed this with my friend Rebecca, and she stated that they do have some practical use, but like, seriously, I think the risks(of obvious piracy and illegal selling) pretty much outweigh the rewards(oh boy, I copied a CD of pictures for my sister-in-law). Who pays $700 for a machine of that nature?? NOBODY(or least I hope nobody does). I mean, I can certainly remember my own mother copying over movies we got from Netlfix onto blank CDs. I’m fairly certain that we have at least four spindles worth of copied movies down in my basement. Now, while we’ve never sold them, I can’t imagine that there isn’t something a little illegal about what my family used to do. Second, are burners associated with charges? Do you have to pay a charge for each CD burned? Witt mentions that Glover apparently did this with video games, CDs, and movies back in the day around page 101. Also, fun fact, video game emulators are one of the biggest threats in the current game market, but I don’t think you could ever compare it to the problems that the music industry faced with their issues of piracy.
Mitt talks about Morris’ past attempts to deal with piracy. Witt mentions, “He had, however, learned an entirely different lesson from the tape-trading era. You didn’t solve the problem of piracy by calling the cops. You solved in by putting out Thriller.”
I was really lost in the logic here, and I don’t think Witt really followed up this example with sound explanation of how big hits somehow cut down on piracy.
“The MP3 certainly sounded better than either of those. 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.”(132)
This sounds like an expansive view of the privatization of music. Or maybe even more so, the accessibility and freedom of choice regarding music. People were willing to sacrifice sound quality for the freedom to choose their music and have access to it wherever they went(whether they listened to it privately or in a public setting).
“To a limited extent, Morris could rely on Universal’s back catalog: the number of Led Zeppelin albums sold each year actually was a pretty good indicator of the number that would be sold in the next.”(173)
This almost seems like a precuring thought to what would later become VEVO. Repeated sales in order to keep the music industry afloat. The real question, to me, that arrives with piracy, is who is really affected by the stolen goods?? The tops dogs seem to be safe, and so do their artists, so who is really losing out??
203 describes Glover as being a sort of movie man. I actually have run into people like this before, and I definitely remember an 8 year old me buying the moving ‘Underdog’ off of a street vendor in New York about a week before the film came out in theatres.
The rest of my quotes are basic repeats of what you can see above. I’m glad to know that Kali got out, and I’m actually really surprised that I found myself rooting for the pirates in this real life story. The whole book was rather entertaining. I think the only thing I didn’t appreciate was the shifting triple narrative. It made it really hard to keep up in certain points. Sometimes the narratives weaved together really well, and then other times, I really struggled to find connections between chapters and chapters.
A really good book, I’ve been recommending it to my family and friends throughout today.
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