NEW YORK, NEW YORK – JUNE 11: (L-R) Philip Byron, Method Man, Alexandria Stapleton, Stephen Witt, … [+]
Getty Images for Paramount+
Paramount+’s fascinating new music docuseries How Music Got Free is based on Stephen Witt’s book of the same name, which almost wasn’t the groundbreaking tell-all it turned out to be. It shows how the music industry went from selling CDs to the masses at high prices and making more money than ever to cratering and nearly disappearing.
“I wanted to write a book about the history of the MP3. That’s what I thought I was writing,” Witt shared during a recent conversation about the beginning of this journey. “I went to Germany and interviewed the engineers who invented it,” he added. “They spent 10 years in this audio laboratory developing this sophisticated technology, and then it conquers the world, but they weren’t talking about how specifically it conquered the world.”
Those who actually created MP3s didn’t want to dive into how it became the way that the world shared and consumed music, partially because the invention nearly led to the downfall of the entire industry. It wasn’t executives at major labels who pushed the product to the public, or even artists. So who made the MP3 a worldwide phenomenon? “Teenagers grabbed it off the server and started using it to pirate files,” Witt confirmed, and that’s the basis for How Music Got Free.
The docuseries takes a hard look at how the internet changed the music industry forever, instantly making it possible for anyone to download whatever they wanted for free. It didn’t take very long for a race to begin between groups of pirates, who all wanted to be the first to share the latest album or single from a superstar. That required an in from someone in the business, and that’s where the show becomes truly shocking.
How Music Got Free isn’t a business series, and it’s certainly not boring. It shows the human side of piracy and demonstrates how even one man can upend an entire industry, should the right opportunity arise.
I spoke with producer Witt and director Alexandria Stapleton about How Music Got Free, their thoughts on piracy, and why they feel this story hasn’t been told before now, even though the crime has been affecting the global business for decades.
Hugh McIntyre: I went into this series thinking I knew what the story was, but there’s so much that I didn’t realize was in this. Tell me how this became a series.
Alexandria Stapleton: Well, obviously it starts with Stephen’s book first and foremost, and then Spring Hill. I was working with Spring Hill at the time. I did one of the first docuseries that they ever did, Shut Up And Dribble, and they kept saying that they were really excited because they were more of a baby company than they are right now, but they had just optioned Stephen’s book. They were just so excited about it. One of the execs there, Phil Byron, was like, “This is an explosive, crazy story that nobody really understands.”
They talked to me about it, and I got a copy of the book. I read lots of books to prep for a pitch or a doc, but this was the only book [that] as I was reading it, I was mapping out how it could possibly be put together as a series.
McIntyre: Wow.
Stapleton: It just came off the page. Stephen and I met in person and got along. Then that started the journey of pitching to a lot of places. When we pitched this, it was pre-COVID, and I think it was hard for people to understand how you could actually film it, because so much of it is on the computer. It was a challenge to pitch, but we finally found our forever home with MTV Studios and Paramount+. I can’t think of a better place for it to be because one of the most exciting things about this series is with the access to the MTV archival library that we were able to include.
McIntyre: Stephen, obviously it started with you, but can you talk about what led you to this story and deciding that this is not just an article, but a full book?
Stephen Witt: It actually came at a completely backwards. I wanted to write a book about the history of the MP3. That’s what I thought I was writing. I went to Germany and interviewed the engineers who invented it. That’s what I thought the story was about when I first started it. I always had a book in mind.
But as I was interviewing them, I came to see that there was this weird gap in their story that they just weren’t talking about. They spent 10 years in this audio laboratory developing this sophisticated technology, and then it conquers the world, but they weren’t talking about how specifically it conquered the world because they had no buy-in from the industry, and it had no buy-in from the major engineering firms. I was like, how exactly did that technology transfer happen?
I started looking it up, and I found this trove of early web documents that showed that these teenagers grabbed it off the server and started using it to pirate files.
Now, the [server] guys had selective amnesia when they talked about that period of time. They didn’t want anyone to know that had happened. But as I dug into the pirates, I was like, “Oh my God, this is an incredible story.” So I completely reworked the book, and I completely reworked my own pitch to be completely about that. It actually was the first thing I ever wrote. I kind of did it backwards. As I said, I wrote a book first, and then later I became a magazine journalist.
Then I got connected with Spring Hill and Alex. And as Alex said, it was a little difficult to conceptualize. How do you turn that into a documentary when you have to show things on TV? Alex did a fantastic job with that, as did the graphics team, but it was really the interviews with the pirates that we conducted—they really made the documentary work.
McIntyre: How did the book get to Spring Hill, and how did that conversation begin?
Witt: It bounced around for a bit, but a producer named Phil Byron. Phil got really attached to it and loved it and pushed really, really hard for the story. Almost legendarily hard to get this made. Phil just did such a great job.
McIntyre: Wow. Good job, Phil. This is your first book, and then you of course went on to do more writing and journalism. What was it like hearing from that company and having these discussions with your first book? Were you at all nervous about making this a film?
Witt: I had no idea what I was doing, so I wasn’t really nervous. I was just like, okay, here I am talking to a Hollywood producer. I had no background. I’d never done that before. It had never really been my intention. It was sort of surprising. I was definitely a little bit out of my element at first, but it turned out to be relatively easy and painless to navigate.
McIntyre: Alex, was there something in particular that made you think, I have to do this?
Stapleton: It was like I was living out my teenage years in early adulthood in the story, on top of the pirates and the artists that we were able to connect with. To me, the real heartbeat of the story is Shelby and Del and the factory workers. This whole world that Del built on a computer, but then also when he did IRL [in real life]. That sealed the deal for me.
I’m a Black Southerner, and I think that’s really important. I’m in this new phase in my career, I would say, where I’m really trying to mine as much as possible for stories that people think that they understand, but they don’t. The B-side is to explore more Southern stories, more Black stories, because I feel like we’re often two-dimensionalized as Southerners, just on a large level.
I feel like people never really explore how rich and diverse…and the innovation that the South has created in modern times. Del’s story is definitely kind of an underdog story. As a man who was born in that town with little resources, you can’t help but ask yourself if he was a white guy and if he was born in Seattle or the Bay or New York or LA, how would his life be different?
The world is still rapidly changing with tech innovation, and where art meets technology. I feel like it’s important to understand that the innovators might be in some of the most unlikely places. That was always in the back of my head.
What’s amazing is that it took a while to come out, but I think it’s the perfect time for people to reflect on this era. But then how do you apply that era to what’s happening today?
Witt: Yeah, it’s funny. When I first started writing this, it was actually a pretty contemporary thing that was going on. It was still happening. Over time, it became a total nostalgia piece, but it actually came out at the right time. I think people, especially from the younger generation who didn’t know what Napster was, who didn’t live through this, will be really attracted and surprised by the material.
McIntyre: And educated. This may be their first introduction to why the music industry is the way that they’re used to.
Stapleton: Yeah.
Witt: Totally yeah.
McIntyre: Alex, it’s interesting to hear you share that perspective of Del and the people of Shelby because as I’m watching it, I went back and forth thinking, “Are these people doing the right thing for them and their families? Are they kind of villains? Are they both?” At times, it even felt like you were maybe on their side based on some quotes that were left in. How do either of you feel about these specific people, the pirates and the people in Shelby?
Stapleton: Well, the people of Shelby, I’m definitely on their side all day every day.
They were completely underpaid. They were making literally nothing. It’s important for people to understand that while the industry was charging $20 for a CD, it cost like 20 cents to make. That’s a big profit margin. And to have a factory that was paying barely enough for people to put food on the table, I think there’s something wrong with that. I felt like when it came to the factory workers that were actually lifting things off the line, I wanted them to be able to defend themselves. Yes, this is technically against the law, but the point was much bigger than that. It was crazy because the record industry was printing money, like hand over fist.
I also think that from the pirate’s perspective, the 2000s were a very decadent decade in American pop culture. Super decadent music videos totally showed off money and the fancy cars, the champagne bottles, all of it creating this image for people in Shelby and all over the country to think like, “Oh, that’s what happens when you get a hit record or a hit song. That’s how they live.” That was being pushed forward. It was also the era of The Apprentice and Donald Trump and money, money, money, money. I mean, not that we’re out of that completely, but it was definitely a very 2000s thing.
I know for a fact that those pirates…they were so young—teenagers to early twenties, and I really do not think that they could have comprehended that what they were doing was being so disruptive to the business. They were totally detached from the music industry. What they didn’t understand was that in the bottoming out of the music industry, the facade of what was being put out there wasn’t always real. Within the music business, within the corporate environment of the music business, when they started to go out of business, a lot of people that were just assistants, editors in the building, junior execs, receptionists, assistants, all sorts of people in the ecosystem lost their jobs.
Now we live in a culture and in a world where we’ve seen, from 2008 on, the bottoming out of certain businesses and how that impacts people.
I think the American public at large can actually understand that a CEO is different than the average worker in a corporate environment. We’re more sophisticated, I think, as a community, to understand that. But back then, I think it was just like, “Oh, all of those people have money and they all live in New York and LA.”
Witt: It’s amazing to think about what they were really doing, which was essentially filling the technological vacuum that the record industry was refusing to fill, right? The record industry was not building out the successor technology to the compact disc because the compact disc was just too profitable for them. Instead, a bunch of random teenagers built the next generation of technology for them, and yeah, it caused a lot of damage. But I don’t think that teenagers were necessarily trying to hurt anyone.
McIntyre: No.
Witt: They weren’t malicious. They just were fascinated by how this stuff worked. And of course, they were also completely entranced by the celebrity of the musicians themselves.
McIntyre: How difficult was it to get the people of Shelby and these pirates to sit down, faces and names out, and talk about what they’ve done?
Witt: When I was reaching out to them, a lot of them really wanted to talk. They were really kind of traumatized by their experience with the FBI I would say, and they wanted to get that story out there. I was really surprised by how receptive they were. Now, some wouldn’t talk at all. Some were like, “I don’t ever want to discuss this period of my life.” But that’s fine. It was enough of them.
The FBI had prosecuted over a hundred people, and so there were enough of them to talk. On top of that, Del was very open from the very start. It was really easy. I think he knew that something really extraordinary had happened to him, that he’d had an impact on the world. He wanted people to know that, I think, and that was always his motivation.
McIntyre: I was also surprised to see someone like Eminem sit down and talk about it. This impacted him so much, but he’s in the same film as the people who hurt him, and are, in some ways, standing up for what they did. What was that conversation like?
Stapleton: For Eminem and all of the artists that participated, Timbaland 50, even Rhymefest, it’s bittersweet. They survived the storm. Those artists, their careers did not end as a result of piracy. Whereas a lot of other artists, it was like a failure to launch.
People went into an abyss because the music industry was tanking. But for them, they survived. I think that they spent over a decade being really angry because they didn’t understand who was really behind it. I think that they thought that the intention was much more nefarious. I think that the biggest thing that they didn’t understand was that the people, the pirates and all of the kids that were on peer-to-peer sites that were sharing the leaked music, we were all fans. All we wanted to do was to hear it and to enjoy that and to be in community and to be able to share it with your teenage friends or your twenty-something-year-old friends.
Like Stephen said, it wasn’t mal-intentioned. I think through the book, and then through the conversations and interviews, they could humanize Del and the pirates and start to understand, “Oh, there was a failure to launch on our side.”
There was a failure with the IRAA and with the people that they were assigned to, the labels, the big corporate guys that were running everything, they were behind the eight ball. They definitely were not listening to the warnings. They were not looking at the red flags. It was a little bit of hubris, and the artists ended up suffering too.
Back when this happened, Metallica versus Napster was the biggest debate, right? It was like the OJ Simpson trial, and everybody had an opinion about it if you were young and a music lover. I feel like that debate was very two-dimensional, and it really didn’t get into the nuances of both sides. And it’s unfortunate because from the artist’s side, the focus just became, well, you have so much money, but it was so much bigger than that. It also wasn’t Metallica only talking about Metallica. It was Metallica also trying to protect their tribe of other musicians.
As a filmmaker, if the rough cut of my film that is only shared with my editors and producers and is very private, if that got leaked onto the internet, I would die. I would be mortified, because it’s an incomplete product. When you create something, you want it to [show that] you’re good at what you do, you’re impassioned about what you do, you want it to be the best possible product to give to your fans. It’s kind of like this perfect storm of all these different angles. And it depends on where you are in the story to understand what your opinion is on it.
Because of how Stephen put the book together, it really helped me to be able to put this film together. You get a chance to sit in each chair and understand what everyone was thinking and feeling.
