May
13
How Music Got Free
May 13, 2018 | Leave a Comment
How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt is by far my favorite of all the books assigned. I found Glover’s story very interesting. His story was told in an out of chapters, but I kept reading because I wanted to know the end result. It was also interesting to read about the Fraunhofer team’s struggle to make the mp3 successful. I was so surprised to learn how long it took for the mp3 to be adopted. However, I am not surprised that the struggle was heavily due to “politics- a hateful state of affairs in which personal relationships and business considerations trumped raw scientific data” (21). The mp3 had superior quality but the mp2 had branding in place. In a past lecture, we discussed how everything in society is laced with politics. All that I’ve known in my lifetime is the mp3. In fact, as a child on of the things I begged my parents for was an mp3 player after I had my CD player for a couple of years.The whole science from Huffman coding to algorithms behind the creation of the mp3 was not the captivating part of the book in my opinion. Lyndell Glover and James Dockery were two men that worked at the PolyGram compact disc manufacturing plant in North Carolina. Witt talks about both men at first but then the main attention goes to Glover. Glover doesn’t have a college degree but from the damage he caused to the music industry he is an intelligent man. “He didn’t budget or keep records, but tracked his cash flows with a mental ledger” (65). Glover was very good with fixing things and was very interested in technology. Glover managed to create a whole system that allowed him to leak CDs out of the plant undetected. The story of Doug Morris was also fascinating. Even with the falls of the music industry, he always seemed to come out on top. He had the secret key that others didn’t, the order-taker. Glover gets into piracy specifically the RNS group. Although the different stories were connected, I did not like how Witt would talk about Glover/piracy then jump to Brandenburg/mp3 and then move to Morris/the music industry. Witt depicts the work of piracy groups and how they affected the music industry. I was happy when Glover decided to walk away because I anticipated him getting caught. I was disappointed that he could not stay away from the thrill of it all. I was also angry that Kali aka Cassim walked away untouched even though he was the leader of the group. In sum, Witt was able to exemplify so many things we discussed in lecture from Bush’s information wants to be free and to Stallman encouraging crowdsourcing.
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