utils/games release groups before. But, CD music? Who thought of this idea?
NFK: I’ve thought of the idea of somehow pirating music. However I never had the means to do so until now. The problem in the past with pirating music was HD space the only means to distribute the music was in the WAV format. That tends to get huge. Especially if you an average song. We eliminated the size constraints. We use a new format to compress our music. The MP3 format. [ sic ]
Using Fraunhofer’s L3Enc encoder, NetFraCk had started a new crew, the world’s first ever digital music piracy group: Compress ’Da Audio, or CDA for short. (The name was a play on the three-letter .cda filename extension Windows used for audio compact discs.) On August 10, 1996, CDA had released to IRC the world’s first “officially” pirated mp3: “Until It Sleeps,” by Metallica, off their album
Load
. Within weeks, there were numerous rival crews and thousands of pirated songs.
Glover was not aware of any of this at the time. He wasn’t sure what an mp3 was, or where it came from, or who was making the files. He simply downloaded a cracked copy of Fraunhofer’s mp3 player, and put in requests for the bots of #mp3 to serve him some of the advertised files. A few minutes later he had a small library of songs on his hard drive.
One of the songs was Tupac Shakur’s “California Love,” which had become inescapable after Pac’s death several weeks earlier. Glover loved Tupac, and when
All Eyez on Me
came through the PolyGram plant, on a special onetime distribution deal with Interscope, he had even shrink-wrapped some of the discs himself. Now, on his home computer, he played the mp3 of “California Love,” and Roger Troutman’s talkbox intro came rattling through its shitty speakers, followed by Dr. Dre’s looped reworking of the piano hook from Joe Cocker’s“Woman to Woman.” Then came the voice of Tupac himself, compressed and digitized from beyond the grave.
Glover had heard this song countless times. It was one of his favorites, and he often listened to it with Dockery on the way to work. He had the disc on hand, and had even used his home burner to make a counterfeit copy. Now he ran a head-to-head comparison between the source and the compressed file. As far as he could tell from his computer speakers, the mp3 version sounded identical to the CD.
At work Glover manufactured CDs for mass consumption. At home, he produced them individually, and had spent over $2,000 on burners and other hardware. His economic livelihood depended entirely on continued demand for the product. But if the mp3 could reproduce Tupac at one-twelfth the bandwidth, and if Tupac could then be distributed, for free, on the Internet, Glover had to wonder: what the hell was the point of a compact disc?
CHAPTER 6
D oug Morris got a new job almost immediately. In July 1995, less than a month after his firing at Time Warner, he was hired by Edgar Miles Bronfman, Jr., the CEO of the Seagram liquor company. Junior was the third-generation scion of the influential Bronfman family of Montreal,the so-called “Rothschilds of the New World.” Since taking over the family business in 1994,Bronfman had pushed for reorganization, courageously attempting to transform Seagram from a boring (if highly profitable) beverage distributor into an exciting (but highly risky) global entertainment powerhouse.
As a business strategy it was demented. The Bronfmans had made forays into the entertainment business before, with little good to show for it. Junior’s father, Edgar Senior, had once made a play for MGM Pictures, before being outmaneuvered by Kirk Kerkorian. Junior’s uncle Charles had for many years owned the Montreal Expos, itself an experiment in slapstick. The elder Bronfman brothers had exited these ventures ignominiously, learning difficult lessons along the way about the volatile and unpredictable nature of show business. But they had failed to pass this wisdom on to
NFK: I’ve thought of the idea of somehow pirating music. However I never had the means to do so until now. The problem in the past with pirating music was HD space the only means to distribute the music was in the WAV format. That tends to get huge. Especially if you an average song. We eliminated the size constraints. We use a new format to compress our music. The MP3 format. [ sic ]
Using Fraunhofer’s L3Enc encoder, NetFraCk had started a new crew, the world’s first ever digital music piracy group: Compress ’Da Audio, or CDA for short. (The name was a play on the three-letter .cda filename extension Windows used for audio compact discs.) On August 10, 1996, CDA had released to IRC the world’s first “officially” pirated mp3: “Until It Sleeps,” by Metallica, off their album
Load
. Within weeks, there were numerous rival crews and thousands of pirated songs.
Glover was not aware of any of this at the time. He wasn’t sure what an mp3 was, or where it came from, or who was making the files. He simply downloaded a cracked copy of Fraunhofer’s mp3 player, and put in requests for the bots of #mp3 to serve him some of the advertised files. A few minutes later he had a small library of songs on his hard drive.
One of the songs was Tupac Shakur’s “California Love,” which had become inescapable after Pac’s death several weeks earlier. Glover loved Tupac, and when
All Eyez on Me
came through the PolyGram plant, on a special onetime distribution deal with Interscope, he had even shrink-wrapped some of the discs himself. Now, on his home computer, he played the mp3 of “California Love,” and Roger Troutman’s talkbox intro came rattling through its shitty speakers, followed by Dr. Dre’s looped reworking of the piano hook from Joe Cocker’s“Woman to Woman.” Then came the voice of Tupac himself, compressed and digitized from beyond the grave.
Glover had heard this song countless times. It was one of his favorites, and he often listened to it with Dockery on the way to work. He had the disc on hand, and had even used his home burner to make a counterfeit copy. Now he ran a head-to-head comparison between the source and the compressed file. As far as he could tell from his computer speakers, the mp3 version sounded identical to the CD.
At work Glover manufactured CDs for mass consumption. At home, he produced them individually, and had spent over $2,000 on burners and other hardware. His economic livelihood depended entirely on continued demand for the product. But if the mp3 could reproduce Tupac at one-twelfth the bandwidth, and if Tupac could then be distributed, for free, on the Internet, Glover had to wonder: what the hell was the point of a compact disc?
CHAPTER 6
D oug Morris got a new job almost immediately. In July 1995, less than a month after his firing at Time Warner, he was hired by Edgar Miles Bronfman, Jr., the CEO of the Seagram liquor company. Junior was the third-generation scion of the influential Bronfman family of Montreal,the so-called “Rothschilds of the New World.” Since taking over the family business in 1994,Bronfman had pushed for reorganization, courageously attempting to transform Seagram from a boring (if highly profitable) beverage distributor into an exciting (but highly risky) global entertainment powerhouse.
As a business strategy it was demented. The Bronfmans had made forays into the entertainment business before, with little good to show for it. Junior’s father, Edgar Senior, had once made a play for MGM Pictures, before being outmaneuvered by Kirk Kerkorian. Junior’s uncle Charles had for many years owned the Montreal Expos, itself an experiment in slapstick. The elder Bronfman brothers had exited these ventures ignominiously, learning difficult lessons along the way about the volatile and unpredictable nature of show business. But they had failed to pass this wisdom on to
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