Everyone knows the story by now: In the late 1990s, a file-sharing protocol called Napster arrived seemingly overnight, making it easy for anyone to download music for free. Recognizing that this posed an existential threat to their business model, the music industry sued, eventually knocking Napster out of business.
Meanwhile, Metallica spoke out forcefully against Napster, leading to bad press and bad feelings among their fans. Then, the iPod came along, and eventually the rise of Spotify and Apple Music.
To its credit, the recent Paramount+ documentary How Music Got Free ― based on a 2015 book by Stephen Witt ― has a different story than the one you probably know. The film, which debuted at South by Southwest in the spring, is streaming on Paramount+ now.
Album Leaks
Directed by Alex Stapleton, How Music Got Free has more interest in a different part of the story ― when popular albums leaked in advance, appearing on file-sharing sites sometimes weeks ahead of their scheduled release.
It turns out that many of the leaks had a surprising source: an employee of a CD printing plant in Shelby, North Carolina, who, along with a group of co-conspirators, would steal the CDs and leak them on file-sharing sites. So whether or not one believes that downloading music is “stealing,” a key part of the file-sharing era was brought about by actual theft.
We hear from Jimmy Iovine and other music industry figures about how the early leaks upended their album rollout plans. However, for some reason, there’s no mention of “The Lillywhite Sessions,” the scrapped Dave Matthews Band album that was leaked to file-sharing sites in 2001.
Eminem — such a Luddite that he once admitted to an interviewer that he wasn’t aware that there was such a thing as Internet pornography — also expresses some long-simmering resentment over how his album leaks hurt him in the past. We also hear from members of the “warez” scene, the folks who were sharing music online even before Napster came along.
The Takeaway
The documentary also makes it clear that while the record industry did all manner of shady things, including screwing over artists, the piracy regime wasn’t such a great thing for musical artists either, making it much more difficult for them to make money. Yes, it only took about $2 to physically print a CD, but that’s not the only cost that matters: the record labels also had to pay the artist and other people to make that CD possible.
That said, while the old system wasn’t particularly fair to artists, the Spotify era, which pays pennies per stream, may be even worse.
I have one major quibble with How Music Got Free; it is officially a “two-part docuseries,” in which both parts top out at about 45 minutes. That’s not a “series,” that’s better known to me as a “movie.”
