how music got free

The vinyl collectors of old had filled whole basements with dusty album jackets, but my digital collection could fit in a shoebox. Nor was that his only achievement; as I researched more, I realized that this man was popular music. The book chronicles the invention of the MP3 format for audio information, detailing the efforts by researchers such as Karlheinz Brandenburg, Bernhard Grill and Harald Popp to analyze human hearing and successfully compress songs in a form that can be easily transmitted. Their spiel was equally brief: a slick reminder of the elegant simplicity of the mp2. Glover was black, wore a chinstrap beard and a well-manicured fade, and dressed in T-shirts and blue jeans. And: do you think perhaps we could borrow some of your engineers for a different project? The meeting began late in the morning. He was 31 years old. Sitting in the living room of his sister’s ranch house, we often talked for hours. That same year, Seitzer applied for a patent for a digital jukebox. (The filter bank worked on sound the way a prism worked on light.) As the ’90s opened, MPEG was preparing for a decade of disruption, shaping technological standards for near-future technologies like high-definition television and the digital video disc. "[1], "On websites and underground file servers across the world," Witt states, "the number of mp3 files in existence grew by several orders of magnitude. Perhaps you remember the a cappella intro to “Tom’s Diner.” It goes like this: Vega had a beautiful voice, but on the early stereo encodings it sounded as if there were rats scratching at the tape. Within a year Brandenburg’s algorithm was handling a wide variety of recorded music. The last was critical. For Seitzer’s scheme to work, the files on the disc would have to be shrunk to one-twelfth their original size, and no known approach to data compression would get you anywhere near this level. Brandenburg then told the computer how to simplify these audio “pixels” using four of Zwicker’s psychoacoustic tricks: First, Zwicker had shown that human hearing was best at a certain range of pitch frequencies, roughly corresponding to the tonal range of the human voice. While Brandenburg’s father was himself a professor, and most of the other Fraunhofer researchers hailed from the upper middle class, Grill’s father had worked in a factory. Sheet Music App for iPad. [2], Witt writes about the obscure online community known as 'The Scene', particularly describing the efforts of the Rabid Neurosis (RNS) group to illegally spread copyrighted material. The ultimate blend of Americana music – Acoustic, Bluegrass, Folk, Roots and Rockabilly – with a touch of Twang. Piracy was a social phenomenon, and once you knew where to look, you could begin to make out individuals in the crowd. We have Youtube Royalty Free music suitable to use as background music for videos you create. [1], The publisher Viking distributed the work on June 16, 2015. Sometimes it “hissed,” like static from an AM radio. You never saw me at the record store and I didn’t DJ parties. Seitzer wanted to do it with 128,000. This was Shelby, a landscape of clapboard Baptist churches and faceless corporate franchises, where one man, acting in almost total isolation, had over a period of eight years cemented his reputation as the most fearsome digital pirate of all. That is, I believed 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. Fourteen different groups submitted entries to the MPEG trials—the high-stakes version of a middle school science fair. After tabulating the answers, MPEG announced the results—it was a tie! The author is even-handed and shows equal disdain for a music industry that couldn't see how the seeds of its demise were being sown in the late 90's and for the MP3 geeks who were sowing the seeds. By STEPHEN WITT. Play the songs, albums, playlists and podcasts you love on the all-new Pandora. When the economic realities of that career choice became apparent, he’d returned to engineering, and ended up studying computers. Discover royalty-free music to fit any type of content. [2], http://stephenwittbooks.com/books/how-music-got-free-hc, "Stephen Witt's 'How Music Got Free' explains just that", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=How_Music_Got_Free&oldid=997060713, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 29 December 2020, at 20:39. There, at some dead hour of the night, long after everyone else had gone home, two mp3 researchers were still in the listening lab, deaf to the world in their expensive Japanese headphones. At quarter size, they sounded OK. Thomson, a French consumer electronics concern, also began to provide money and technical support. He was there in New Jersey, listening to Suzanne Vega, when the Berlin Wall came down. The mp3 could encode higher-quality sound with less data, he said. He spoke more loudly than Brandenburg, with more passion, and conversations with him were composed and natural. When he was done, it was MUSICAM’s turn. Zwicker’s chief finding, accrued over decades of research with real-world test subjects, was that the human ear did not act like a microphone. How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention, Penguin Books; Reprint edition (June 14, 2016). Brandenburg’s real achievement was figuring out that you could run this process iteratively. They were running out of state funding, their corporate sponsors were abandoning them, and, after a four-year sales push, the technology had yet to secure a single long-term customer. Audio encoding problems were an afterthought, one they’d tackled only after Brandenburg pointed out that there was no longer much of a market for silent movies. Many of the files I had pirated—perhaps even a majority of them—had originated with him. … Many compressed samples now revealed a state of perfect “transparency”: even to a discriminating listener like Grill, using the best equipment, they were indistinguishable from the original compact discs. Start now. Then his voice emerged, extremely deep and drenched in the syrupy tones of the small-town South, the medium of delivery for a pithy sentence, maybe less. Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video! This is a really interesting and well written book on the impact of the MP3 and it's becoming a means of free music distribution. In the conference room then, as he lodged his final objection to the committee, the mp3 went out with a whisper. And: remind me again why the German taxpayer has sunk millions of deutsche marks into this idea? There's a problem loading this menu right now. All free! It’s about the greatest pirate in history, the most powerful executive in the music business, a revolutionary invention and an illegal website four times the size of the iTunes Music Store. In the world of audio, Grill stood out, for it was possible to imagine him as something other than an engineer. The team hit a milestone with the 1812 Overture, then another with Tracy Chapman, then another with a track by Gloria Estefan (Grill was on a Latin kick). Engineers, executives, employees, investigators, convicts, even burnouts—they all played a role. Spotify is all the music you’ll ever need. The complexity argument was a myth, he said. Of the 14 original contenders, three methods would survive. Several sorting and filtering options. 01:48. Over 300,000 songs! Brandenburg’s method was complex, and required several computationally demanding mathematical operations to be conducted simultaneously. The definitive accounting of the MP3 shift? "[1] The book recounts how many people wound up building massive archives of music for little other than the thrill created by finding and sorting the information. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 22, 2019. But there … Until finally I found myself in the strangest place of all, a small town in western North Carolina that seemed as far from the global confluence of technology and music as could be. How Music Got Free is a riveting story of obsession, music, crime, and money, featuring visionaries and criminals, moguls and tech-savvy teenagers. Under this more elegant model of distribution, consumers could dial into a centralized computer server, then use the keypad to request music over the new digital telephone lines that Germany was just beginning to install. Neither man had graduated from college. When I arrived at college in 1997, I had never heard of an mp3. . But music remained close to his heart, and over the years he amassed an enormous, eclectic collection of recorded music from a variety of obscure genres. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Seitzer had been Zwicker’s protégé, his experimental audio subject, and, most important, his mortal opponent. Fraunhofer would be included, but only if they agreed to play by certain rules, dictated by MUSICAM. He was emotional, and he knew that, once he began speaking, he might lose control and unleash an angry harangue, fueled by the pent-up frustration he felt toward this group of know-nothing corporate big shots who’d been stringing him along for years. With a “filter bank,” he then further sorted the audio into different frequency partitions. Dockery was white, with close-cropped sandy blond hair and bulbous, glassy eyes. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. The MUSICAM group was really just a proxy for Philips, and Philips was visionary. But the details all checked out, and once, at the end of an interview, I was moved to ask: “Dell, why haven’t you told anybody any of this before?”. I found secret websites in Micronesia and the Congo, registered to shell corporations in Panama, the true proprietors being anyone’s guess. In disagreement, his voice grew almost imperceptible, and in his responses he was guarded in the extreme, careful to never make an assertion without the data to back it up. • To order How Music Got Free for £16 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. I became obsessed, and as I researched more, I began to find the most wonderful things. You can also get your Royalty Free sound effects and choose from a wide range of genres. They revealed every imperfection with grating clarity, and the ability to isolate these digital glitches spurred a cycle of continuous improvement. The mp3 was Betamax. Attention in the conference room turned to Karlheinz Brandenburg, the driving intellectual force behind the technology and the leader of the mp3 team. With time, Seitzer began to outplay the master. From the left pane click on “Free MP3 required” followed by “Refine Results”. My assumption had been that music piracy was a crowdsourced phenomenon. Pop. Put new text under old text. That was the real secret, of course: the Internet was made of people. Defeat was always bitter, but this one was more so since, after 13 years of work, Brandenburg had solved one of the great open questions in the field of digital audio. They traveled in a black Jeep Grand Cherokee four-by-four with heavily tinted windows. This farsighted strategic planning was complemented by a certain gift for low cunning. His mathematical talent was surpassing, and he held his contemporaries in thrall. Privately, Brandenburg wondered if a decade of table tennis with an eccentric otological experimenter had driven Seitzer insane. In later years this group would refer to themselves as “the original six.”. The talks grew acrimonious, and once again Brandenburg sensed behind-the-scenes machinations of a political nature. Witt comments that "the uniform blandness of the corporate sound wasn’t helping" and gives a mixed picture as to how Morris and other executives dealt with falling sales. He was very tall, but he hunched, and his body language was erratic. Termed “Huffman coding,” this approach had been developed by the pioneering computer scientist David Huffman at MIT in the 1950s. Both were practicing Baptists. Seeking to mediate, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG)—the standards committee that even today decides which technology makes it to the consumer marketplace—convened a contest in Stockholm in June 1990 to conduct formalized listening tests for the competing methods. By this time, both Brandenburg and Grill were beginning to suspect that the suits at Philips were influencing MPEG’s decisions by lobbying behind the scenes. Karlheinz Brandenburg, too, was devastated. “ How Music Got Free doubles as a detailed ode to the MP3 as it tells the story of three men grappling with digital compression technology and its widespread fallout. It’s a story you may think you know, but Mr. Witt brings fresh reporting to bear, and complicates things in terrific ways. Increases in processing power spurred progress. He found recordings of birdcalls and crowd noise. The second was a snippet of Suzanne Vega singing the opening bars of “Tom’s Diner,” her 1987 radio hit. . Catchy melodies with rhythms to match. Also there is a lot of mystery surrounding a certain Kali who we do not know who he is and he also probably did not play as important a role as the author believes. What Brandenburg could do here, though, was dump the output bits from his compression method into a second, completely different one. By 2005, when I moved to New York, I had collected 1,500 gigabytes of music, nearly 15,000 albums worth. Nor could you use Huffman’s pattern recognition approach—the essence of speech was its dynamic nature, its plosives and sibilants and glottal stops. Brandenburg thought this goal was preposterous—it was like trying to build a car on a budget of two hundred dollars. Neither had lived more than a few miles away from the place where he’d been born. Please try your request again later. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Still, the idea stayed with him. The first was a recording of a difficult German dialect that had plagued audio engineers for years. MUSICAM also had several German researchers on staff, and Brandenburg suspected this was not a coincidence. Brandenburg was confident his group would win. Here, too, increasing the relative loudness of one of the clicks made the effect more pronounced. The next day a room full of fair-haired, clear-eared Scandinavian virgins spent the morning listening to “Fast Car” ripped 14 different ways. It's a one-of-a-kind on the market, and the book's flaws shouldn't deter you from reading it. Then, with a naming scheme that could only have come from a committee of engineers, MPEG announced the other two methods: MUSICAM’s method, which would henceforth be known as the Moving Picture Experts Group, Audio Layer II—better known today as the mp2—and Brandenburg’s method, which would henceforth be known as the Moving Picture Experts Group, Audio Layer III—better known today as the mp3. How to Download Music for Free using ReverbNation? Some books are hard to put down. Perhaps it was his background. The listeners scored the results for sound quality on a five-point scale. Ad-free music with unlimited skips. Internet Audio Archive. They handed out a presentation, too. Dubbing this insight “analysis by synthesis,” he spent the next few sleepless weeks writing a set of mathematical instructions for how those precious bits could be assigned. The book started off a bit slow but about two chapters in, I was always eager to get back to it after putting it aside. The three perspectives applied in the book for narration were well-chosen by the author, and he paints a comprehensive picture giving one an opportunity to reflect on one's own place in it. While each story is spell binding it does not really address the fact that many people in regard to music do not want to understand the concept of intellectual property. In particular, he suspected that, by exploiting Zwicker’s research into the ear’s inherent flaws, it might be possible to record high-fidelity music with very small amounts of data. He was brilliant, though. He wanted to throw everything he could find at Brandenburg’s algorithm, to be sure it could handle every conceivable case. CD audio used more than 1.4 million bits to store a single second of stereo sound. Their collaboration spurred several breakthroughs, and soon the scratching rats were banished. By the middle of 1986, Brandenburg had even written a rudimentary computer program that provided a working demonstration of this approach. The right side pane has a column for free music. FreeMusic is a powerful third-party free music player client for SoundCloud®. My older friends regarded piracy with skepticism, and sometimes outright hostility. But he also thought it was a worthy target for his own ambitions. This effect was especially true when the lower-pitched tone was louder than the higher one. And: why do you have fewer than 100 customers? Then you can use these points to exchange for prizes, such as Apple Music free … No credit card needed. A violin concerto might have all sorts of psychoacoustic redundancies; a violin solo would not. An increasingly agitated Grill repeatedly stopped by the conference room, then left to pace the hall with his colleagues. Fraunhofer’s approach provided better audio quality with less data, but MUSICAM’s required less processing power. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in, $12.46 Shipping & Import Fees Deposit to France. But he felt he was being ignored. After a subtle dig at the mp3’s processing power requirements, he concluded with a direct plea to the working group’s voting members: “Don’t destabilize the system.” Then the steering committee—in the interests of stability, presumably—voted to abandon the mp3 forever. The Fraunhofer team, consisting of young, naive academics, were unprepared for such a battle. You can use this music for free in your multimedia project (online videos (Youtube, Facebook,...), websites, animations, etc.) But the Fraunhofer team already had its own filter bank, which worked fine. Many had thrown their weight behind Fraunhofer’s better-established competitors. The Philips delegate hadn’t even made a real argument. In so doing, they became extremely wealthy. [1] Kirkus Reviews ran a praising response to the book, with it labeled as a "propulsive and fascinating portrait of the people who helped upend an industry and challenge how music and media are consumed". Streaming, Sharing, Stealing: Big Data and the Future of Entertainment (The MIT Press), Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Refiguring American Music), Awakening: The Music Industry In The Digital Age, All You Need to Know About the Music Business: 10th Edition, Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music (The MIT Press), Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, The Hollywood Economist 2.0: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies, The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce, “The richest explanation to date about how the arrival of the MP3 upended almost everything about how music is distributed, consumed and stored. They’d had access to Zwicker’s untranslated research, too. Witt states that Glover and RNS became the world’s premier music pirates, possibly costing the record industry millions of dollars. They were a dark horse candidate from a research institution, a bunch of graduate students competing against established corporate players. First, Brandenburg’s compression algorithm could be used to “stream” music—that is, send it directly to the user from a central server, as Seitzer had envisioned. Once a chip was created, the team would use it to compress a ten-second sample from a compact disc, then compare it with the original to see if they could hear the difference. The lab was a sea of cables, speakers, signal processors, CD players, woofers, and converters. Typisch Deutsch, after all. In early 1995, the mp2 again beat the mp3 in a standards competition, this time for a massive market: the audio track for the home DVD player. In other words, you could take the output of his bit-assignment algorithm, feed it back into the algorithm, and run it again. And these subjects required training to understand the vocabulary of failure as well as Grill did. Following their trail to a flat in northern England, I found a high-fidelity obsessive who had overseen a digital library that would have impressed even Borges. I was an engineer when mp3 was coming out and we looked at it and tried to find a way to make money from it. As a child he’d read biographies of the great inventors, and at an early age had internalized the importance of the hands-on approach. Even at the aggressive 12 to 1 compression ratio, the mp3 sounded decent, if not quite stereo quality. Electronica. But one audio source was proving intractable: what Grill, with his imperfect command of English, called “the lonely voice.” (He meant “lone.”) Human speech could not, in isolation, be psychoacoustically masked. During a brief period in his early 20s he had played professionally in a nine-piece swing band. Brandenburg quickly realized that, despite the subgroup’s official recommendation, the mp3 was guaranteed nothing. In advance of the meeting, the committee’s specialized audio subgroup even formally recommended the adoption of the mp3. So in the spring of 1995, when Fraunhofer entered its final competition, for a subset of multicast frequencies on the European radio band, winning was everything. Second, Zwicker had shown that tones that were close in pitch tended to cancel each other out. Brandenburg—like Bell, like Edison—was an inventor first. Thus, Brandenburg felt, MPEG should look to conserve bandwidth rather than processing cycles, and he repeatedly made this argument to the audio committee. MPEG had not anticipated a tie, and had not made provisions to break one. Finally, a representative from Philips took the floor. Glover was 21 years old. How Music Got Free (2015) tells the remarkable story of the mp3 file, from its inception in a German audio lab to its discovery by a man working in a North Carolina CD-pressing plant, who would eventually team up with a piracy group to bring the entire music industry to its knees. When he talked, he tended to dwell on practical matters, and, perhaps sensing boredom on the part of the listener, he would occasionally pepper this rambling technical discourse with weakly delivered, unfunny jokes. For the final time, a group of supposedly impartial experts snubbed the technology, favoring its eternal rival, the mp2. For a graduate student, Brandenburg was unusually interested in the dynamic potential of the marketplace. Brandenburg needed a virtuoso, a caffeine-addled superstar who could translate graduate-level mathematical concepts into flawless computer code. Worse, engineers there seemed to have started a whisper campaign, to spread the word about these failures to the audio engineering community at large. The passenger’s name was James Anthony Dockery, but everyone called him “Tony.” The driver’s name was Bennie Lydell Glover, but everyone called him “Dell.”. The book chronicles the invention of the MP3 format for audio information, detailing the efforts by researchers such as Karlheinz … The body of research the committee was dismissing went back decades, and engineers had been theorizing about something like the mp3 since the late 1970s. "Do you realize what you’ve done?" After an initial period spent marking territory, the two decided to cooperate. Seitzer, by contrast, was a computer scientist, and he anticipated the coming era of digitization. The committee would make multiple endorsements. Despite me being a couple of years younger than Witt and the first wave of music pirates, it felt a bit like reading my own history too – although nothing made me feel older than realising just how many years ago Napster was shut down. [. He was what they called a “golden ear”: he could distinguish between microtones and pick up on frequencies normally available only to children and dogs. There was degradation of course: like a copy of a copy or a fourth-generation cassette dub, with each successive pass of the algorithm, audio quality got worse. Never could come up with a way. ) Half of the “work” the mp3 did was just getting around it. Over the next few years, in five straight head-to-head competitions, they got swept. With a “sampler,” he divided the incoming sound into fractional slivers of a second. They urged him to hold on just a little bit longer. There was an error retrieving your Wish Lists. Where the sales literature promised “Perfect Sound Forever,” Seitzer saw a maximalist repository of irrelevant information, most of which was ignored by the human ear. Under Grill’s direction, Fraunhofer also purchased several pairs of thousand-dollar Stax headphones. The author basically focuses on the inventor of the MP3, one music business CEO (Morris) and some low level workers at a CD plant that leaked erly releases. Beginning in 1987, they took on the full-time task of creating commercial products based on Brandenburg’s patent. The only hard part was figuring out what to listen to. 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. . The combined result united decades of research into acoustic physics and human anatomy with basic principles of information theory and complex higher math. It's about the greatest pirate in history, the most powerful executive in the music business, a revolutionary invention and an illegal website four times the size of the iTunes Music Store. This was true even for those who loved music—in fact, it was especially true for them. Without cymbal crashes, or an overlapping cello, or high register information to be simplified, there was just a pure tone and nowhere to hide. The things he told me were astonishing—at times they seemed almost beyond belief. I am a member of the pirate generation. At half size, the files sounded decent. But this was just the first step. The ear was only as good as it needed to be to achieve these goals, and no better.

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