How music got free

CHAPTER 8

In 1998 Glover built a tower. That is, seven compact disc burners, stacked vertically, that duplicated perfect copies of a source. The burners ran at four times speed, so in the course of an hour Glover could produce about thirty clones. Glover scoured #warez and other underground networks for material to sell. PlayStation games, PC applications, mp3 files . . . anything that could be burned to a disc and sold in a hand-to-hand transaction for a few dollars in loose cash.

He focused especially on movies. Video compression was just arriving to the pirate networks, and this had led to an influx of low-grade rips. Home DVD burners hadn’t yet arrived, and the release groups relied on an inferior technology known as “Video Compact Disc.” Glover downloaded this material, made copies with his tower, then sold the bootleg discs for five to ten dollars apiece. The video quality was poor, but business was brisk.

Soon he was buying blank CDs in bulk, snapping up spindles of hundreds of discs at a time. He bought a label printer to catalog his product, and another color printer to make mock-ups of the movie posters. He bought a black nylon CD binder, filled it with the color posters, and used this as a sales catalog. He kept his inventory in the trunk of his Jeep and sold the movies by the side of the road.

The one thing he didn’t sell was leaked CDs from the plant. While these continued to trade on the black market, Glover considered them too risky. It had taken an awful lot of overtime hours to make the move to permanent, and he didn’t want to chance his employment status. Also, he needed health insurance. His son Markyce had been born the year before, and his mental ledger now contained terrifying entries for things like diapers and child care. His own upbringing had instilled in him the importance of family, and he was mentally prepared for fatherhood, if not marriage exactly.

He matured a little. He tried, for a while, to spend more time at home. He got another tattoo, on his bicep, of an enormous Christian cross. In the mornings before work, he would rise from his restless sleep and brush his teeth with little Markyce. In the evenings, he would sit the child on his lap and play with him amidst the whirring background of the burning bootlegged discs.

As soon as he’d saved up enough cash, he moved with his girlfriend out of the trailer and into a modest apartment. The move marked the end of the dog-breeding experiment. This had not been a lucrative venture. Pit bull puppies were a pure commodity, a market with no barriers to entry, and the premium on pedigree litters had been competed away. This experience was a lesson for Glover, as he began to see that success in a capitalist economy required a durable competitive advantage. So he started to act as a middleman between the street and the Scene. But even so, he struggled, losing out to his primary competitor: Tony Dockery.

Dockery had built a tower, too, and he sold to many of the same customers. But Dockery’s inventory was better than Glover’s—better in fact than anyone in the state. Dockery was somehow finding things on the Internet that Glover couldn’t: movies still in theaters, applications still in beta, PlayStation games that weren’t scheduled to be released for months. When Glover asked Dockery where he was sourcing this material, the answers he received were evasive.

Competition sucked. Dockery’s refusal to share put a strain on the two men’s friendship. They stopped commuting together, and at the plant they scheduled different shifts. Thus Glover was alone when he was pulled over in 1999 for a routine traffic stop while driving through the town of Kings Mountain. He hadn’t committed a traffic violation, and suspected he was guilty only of “driving while black.” This happened often, and Glover had a rehearsed routine. When the police officer approached the vehicle, Glover, as required by law, informed him that he had a gun stored in the gap between his car seats.

The officer told Glover that he had just committed a crime. He explained that North Carolina state law required handguns to be placed on the dashboard during a traffic stop, in full view of the officer. Even though Glover had a permit for the gun, the traffic stop ended with him facing a felony weapons charge. Before the first court date, the prosecutor offered him a bargain: turn the weapon over to the cops, and the charge would be dismissed. Glover did so, and his record remained clean, but the experience felt to him like a shakedown.

A dark period followed. His sleep apnea worsened. Two of his friends died in street racing accidents, and, confronted with his own mortality, he sold the Suzuki bike. He began working hard again—long hours, late hours, overnight shifts. His relationship deteriorated. He spent too much time on the Internet. His girlfriend moved out, taking their baby.

Then came the announcement: Philips was selling PolyGram to Universal Music Group. The sale included the music labels, the studios, the intellectual property, the contracts with artists, and the entire pressing and distribution network, including the Kings Mountain plant. The employees were nervous, understandably, but management told them not to worry. The plant wasn’t shutting down—it was expanding.

The production lines were upgraded to the point where they could manufacture half a million CDs a day. An extra warehouse was built to store the finished product. The labor force nearly doubled and the empty positions were filled by temp agencies in a mad rush of hiring. The parking lot overflowed with cars, and the cafeteria could barely feed the workers.

One of the new hires was a Shelby local by the name of Karen Barrett. The manufacturing floor was not normally a place of beauty, but Barrett was a stunner. She was thin, with high cheekbones, fair skin, and long, naturally blond hair. Her squarish jaw and her slightly upturned nose gave her a spritely, impudent appearance, and while shy on first contact, she soon revealed her true persona through tart and surprisingly opinionated exchanges with her coworkers. She showed up in late 1999, and they put her on the packaging line.

Dockery tried first. He was unsuccessful in repeated attempts. He did, however, manage to convince her to join him, Glover, and a group of other employees in regular outings to the bowling alley. At the lanes, over beers, as Dockery continued to petition, Glover noticed that Karen was looking in his direction instead.

In the weeks to come, the two learned they had much in common. Like Glover, Barrett was a product of the small-town South. She spoke with an accent as thick as Glover’s, and used many of the same regional colloquialisms. She had the same education and similar economic prospects. She shared his taste in music, listening to a broad variety of country, rock, and rap. And she loved car culture—loved the big stereos and the joyrides and the rims.

Like Glover, Barrett had a child from a previous relationship, and the two commiserated over the difficulties of single parenthood. Within a few months, they were discussing cohabitation, and soon lived together in a complex family relationship. Glover informally adopted Barrett’s child and began to raise him as his own. When visitation allowed, Markyce stayed the night as well. Barrett and Glover arranged offsetting shifts at the plant, ensuring that one would always be home with the children.

Karen wasn’t the only new face at the plant. A new manager was brought in from Denmark as well, a tightly wound expert in manufacturing efficiency. Other local facilities were shut down, and Kings Mountain became the regional command center. (If you followed that chain of command up through several levels of hierarchy, you would eventually get to Doug Morris, and above that, Junior himself.) The merger was a hassle, but it meant more shifts, more overtime hours, and, best of all, more music. Universal, it seemed, had cornered the market on rap. Jay-Z, Eminem, Dr. Dre, Cash Money—Glover packaged the albums himself.

The company understood how desirable this product was becoming. Before, leaking from the plant had been a lark, one that caused small amounts of localized damage to the parent company. In the Internet age, though, a leaked album was a catastrophe. All it took was one disc in the hands of the wrong person to screw the whole release process up. Universal rolled out its albums with heavy promotion and expensive marketing blitzes, including videos, radio spots, television campaigns, and the late night circuit. The availability of prerelease discs on the Internet interfered with this schedule, upsetting months of work by publicity teams and leaving the artists betrayed.

The plant implemented a new regime of stringent antitheft measures. Driving these changes was Steve Van Buren, who managed plant security. Van Buren had worked at the plant since 1996 and had been pushing for better security since before the Universal merger. He was aware of the plant’s reputation for leaking and determined to fix it. His professional reputation was on the line, and the stakes were now higher than before.

Van Buren began hosting regular meetings with the plant’s employees. In these meetings he told them about something called the “crime triangle.” According to this behavioral theory, criminal activity resulted from a combination of three factors: desire, time, and opportunity. You needed all three factors for a crime to occur. Van Buren could not mold people’s desires, and he was not in charge of their time. So, he explained, the best way for him to reduce crime was to limit opportunity.

This was difficult to accomplish. The discs themselves were small and could easily be hidden in loose clothing. Their thin aluminum cores didn’t contain enough metal to set off a walk-through detector, and Van Buren didn’t want to humiliate the employees with invasive pat-downs. After contacting a number of metal detector manufacturers, he hit upon a solution: a specialized handheld wand that could detect even trace amounts of aluminum. But wanding was a time-consuming process, so Van Buren implemented a randomized system. Inspired by customs procedures, each employee was now required to swipe a magnetized identification card upon leaving the plant. Four out of five times, the card set off the green light and the employee was permitted to exit. One out of five, the card set off the red light and the employee was made to stand aside as a private security guard ran the wand around his torso and up and down his limbs.

Van Buren took other steps to cut the leg of the triangle. He believed in the importance of what he called a “good clear fence line,” and ordered the underbrush removed from the chain-link fence around the plant. He had closed-circuit TV cameras installed on the building’s exterior walls. He ordered a second chain-link fence to be installed around the plant’s parking lots, and created a whitelist for permitted vehicles. Approved cars were now required to install a bar code on their dashboards, and this was scanned by security on entrance. His dedication to the job even took him past the plant’s perimeter. Tipped off by employees to an illicit trade in the plant’s pre-release material, Van Buren began to frequent the nearby flea markets in search of contraband. Sure enough, he found it, in a roadside flea market off U.S. Route 321, a few miles east of the plant. The same guys who had once sold leaked discs to Glover now sold to an undercover Van Buren, and in time this led to several arrests.

And yet somehow a quiet trade in smuggled discs continued. Glover didn’t know the exact methods, but certain temporary employees were still able to get the discs past Van Buren’s security regime. One of them had even managed to sneak out an entire manufacturing spindle of 300 discs, and was selling these piecemeal for five bucks a pop. This trade was a closed circuit, and only select employees were admitted into the cabal. Most were temps, with little to lose, and some had criminal backgrounds. They were not, as a rule, familiar with computers. Glover was different from them—a permanent employee with a virgin rap sheet and a penchant for technology. But he also had a reputation as a roughrider, and he was close to the codes of the street. He knew how to keep his mouth shut, and he was welcomed as a customer.

Dockery was not. Perhaps he was seen as too talkative, or maybe simply too square. Whatever the case, he now had to rely on Glover for access. In return, he offered to cut Glover in on the mysterious current of prerelease Internet media he had somehow tapped. But the terms of this relationship were uneven, and as Dockery began to pester him for more and more titles, Glover became annoyed. Finally, one day in late 1999, he confronted his friend.

Look, I’m tired of sticking my neck out for you, said Glover. What is this all about? Why do you want this stuff so badly? And where are you getting all these movies from?

Come over to my house tonight, said Dockery. I’ll explain.

In front of the computer that evening, Dockery outlined the basics of the #warez underworld. For the past year or so, he said, he’d been uploading prerelease leaks from the plant to a shadowy network of online enthusiasts. Although chat channels like #mp3 and #warez looked chaotic, they actually relied on a high-level of structure that was kept hidden from public view. This was the Scene, and Dockery, on IRC, had joined one of its most elite groups: Rabid Neurosis.

They called it RNS for short. The group had formed a few weeks after Compress ’Da Audio, the pioneering mp3 releasing group. Within months they had eclipsed the originals, and quickly competed them out of existence. Instead of pirating individual songs, RNS was pirating whole albums, and bringing the same elite “zero-day” mentality from software to music. The goal was to beat the official release date wherever possible, and that meant a campaign of infiltration against the music majors.

The founders of RNS had gone by the handles “NOFX” and “Bonethug,” although Dockery never interacted with these two. They dated back to the distant mists of 1996, as might be inferred by the musical acts their screen names referred to. By the time Dockery had joined, in 1998, under the handle “StJames,” leadership had passed to a figure named “Havoc.”

Havoc was a legend in Scene circles. He worked at a commercial radio station somewhere in Canada. He had access. Although he never revealed his real name, he would sometimes share backstage pictures of himself at concerts, his arms draped around the shoulders of famous musicians. For a while he had been the group’s best asset, sourcing dozens of leaks, often directly from the unsuspecting hands of the artists themselves. But then, in early 1999, Havoc abruptly stepped away. He never gave a reason why.

After some discussion, leadership passed to another member, who went by the name of “Al_Capone.” Capone had discovered the Scene at the age of thirteen, after being banned from AOL for trolling. He’d established himself in RNS by making online friends in Europe, then arbitraging offset transatlantic launch dates to source prerelease albums. But his reign at the top was short. Capone was undisciplined, and under his leadership, the group ballooned in membership to more than a hundred members, violating basic principles of Scene security. After a few tumultuous months, Capone gave up his duties, claiming that he was “too busy” to lead the group. (In reality, he’d just turned seventeen, and was moving out of his parents’ house.)

The mantle finally passed to a permanent presence. This was “Kali,” who was selected through what amounted to an executive search committee. Kali had not previously been an especially visible member of the group. Unlike Havoc, he did not have insider access. But, unlike Capone, he never claimed to. What he did have was Scene cred. For years Kali had been a member of another Scene group, a games-cracking crew named Fairlight, and his exploits there were celebrated. Also, he was old enough to vote.

Kali’s leadership brought a kind of military discipline to the group. He was a natural spymaster, a master of surveillance and infiltration, the Karla of music piracy. He read Billboard like a racing form, and used it to untangle the confusing web of corporate acquisitions and pressing agreements that determined what CDs would be manufactured, where, and when. Once this map of the distribution channels was charted, he began an aggressive campaign of recruitment, patiently building a network of moles that would over the next eight years manage to burrow into the supply chains of every major music label.

Dockery—known to him only as St. James—was his first big break. They’d been in a chat channel together and Dockery had started bragging about an unreleased CD. Kali, skeptical, had asked him for proof, so Dockery had sent him a track. Kali, recognizing the importance of what he’d found, immediately recruited him into the group. At first a peripheral player, following the Universal merger Dockery had become RNS’ single best source. But now, thanks to the new security regime, his access had dried up, and he was proposing to pass the responsibilities on to Glover.

Dell was in an unusual position. With his street cred and his technical expertise, he was one of the few people in the world capable of securing the trust of both low-level physical smugglers and top-level online pirates. RNS invites were handed out rarely, and typically on a probationary basis, but, if Glover wanted, Dockery could arrange to have Kali fast-track him into the group this same day.

Glover hesitated: what was in it for him?

Dockery explained: Glover needed Kali just as much as Kali needed Glover. As head of RNS, Kali was the gatekeeper to the distributed archive of secret “topsite” servers that formed the backbone of the Scene. These ultra-fast servers contained terabytes of pirated media of every form. Movies, games, TV shows, books, pornography, software, fonts—pretty much anything with a copyright was there for download. The encrypted Scene servers were well hidden, access was password protected, and logons were permitted only from a whitelist of preapproved Internet addresses. All logging software on them was disabled so as not to leave a trail. The Scene controlled its own inventory as well as Universal did—maybe better.

Access to this topsite “darknet” was granted exclusively on a quid pro quo basis. To get in, you had to contribute pirated material of your own. And not just some old Shania Twain CD you found lying in your sock drawer; it had to be something new, something in high demand. The lure of the darknet—the promise of the digital library—was enough to corrupt. Somewhere out there were Glover’s counterparts: guys in the movie business, guys who worked for game companies, guys who worked in software design. (They were almost all guys.) Somewhere out there were software testers, DVD screeners, and warehouse workers. Somewhere out there, in every supply chain, someone like Glover was leaking too. The media on the topsite servers was available weeks before it could be found in stores, or even elsewhere on the Internet. The spread of files from these servers was carefully monitored and controlled; leaking to the Scene was rewarded, but leaking from the Scene was taboo. The files took a long time to migrate to the chat channels and the Web. Sometimes they never left the closed economy of the Scene at all.

If Glover was willing to upload smuggled CDs from the plant to Kali, he’d never have to pay for media again. He could get free copies of AutoCAD software that retailed for thousands of dollars. He could hear the new Outkast album weeks before anyone else. He could play Madden Football on his PlayStation a month before it was available in stores. And he could get the same access to prerelease movies that had allowed Dockery to beat him as a bootlegger. How did that sound?

Glover decided that sounded pretty good. So Dockery arranged a chat room session between Glover and Kali, and the two exchanged cell phone numbers.

Their first call was awkward. Glover, never much for conversation to begin with, mostly just listened. Kali spoke quickly and animatedly, in a strange patois of geek-speak, California mellow, and borrowed slang from West Coast rap: “Could you, like, FXP me the file, dogg?” Kali loved computers, but he also loved hip-hop. He knew its history and culture and could rhyme along with his favorite rappers. He knew all the beefs, all the disses, and all the details of the internecine label feuds. And he also knew that, in the aftermath of the murders of Biggie and Tupac, those feuds were dying down and the labels were consolidating. Death Row, Bad Boy, Cash Money, and Aftermath were all going corporate. In his relentless quest for zero-day leaks, Kali tracked these pressing and distribution deals carefully, and his research kept bringing him back to Universal. But without consistent access inside that company, rival release crews had been beating him. Glover was his ticket in.

The two hashed out the details of their partnership. Kali would track release dates of upcoming albums online and alert Glover to the material he was interested in. Glover, through his associates, would arrange for the CDs to be smuggled out of the plant. From his home computer, Glover would then rip the leaked CDs to mp3 format and transmit them via encrypted channels to Kali’s personal server. Kali would then package the mp3 files and release them according to the Scene’s exacting technical standards. In return for all this, Kali would send Glover invites to the secret topsites.

Glover had tried to clean up his act. He had given up on the guns and the bikes and the ferocious dogs. He had worked hard at several jobs, and tried to be a family man, even. But then he joined the Scene, and left one outlaw subculture for another.