Stream It Or Skip It: ‘How Music Got Free’ on Paramount+, A Docuseries About MP3 Piracy And A Record Industry Reckoning

How Music Got Free, now streaming on Paramount+, is a two-part docuseries exec produced in part by Marshall “Eminem” Mathers and LeBron James and based on the book of the same name by journalist Stephen Gill. Both Eminem and Gill are featured interviews in How Music Got Free, which revists the mid-to-late 1990s and the furor over MP3 file sharing that predated the establishment of today’s audio streaming platforms. Other featured interviews include Timbaland, 50 Cent, and Rhymefest; record industry types like Hilary Rosen and Jimmy Iovine; and members of the anonymous or avatar-only online file sharing communities that first figured out how to transform the audio from a physical compact disc into a shareable commodity for free streaming. 

HOW MUSIC GOT FREE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “Would you believe me if I told you this little town down south brought the music industry to its knees?” Providing the narration for How Music Got Free is Method Man, and the town in question is Shelby, NC, where there happened to be a facility that manufactured compact discs.  

The Gist: When a limousine from Universal Music Group would arrive at the Shelby facility, it was with a recording master of the latest album from one of the label’s hugest artists, like Eminem, or Mary J. Blige, or Outkast. And in the factory, once that single master was put through its paces – the clean room, the printing, the laser cutting, the multiplying – it would become the source code for the proliferation of hundreds of millions of CDs. Having already convinced consumers to re-purchase their record collections in the new format, the labels were enjoying a massive revenue bump on the front end while keeping output low on the back end. What did it cost to manufacture a disc at the Shelby plant? A dollar? Less? But out on the streets, people were still dropping 20 bucks each to buy The Eminem Show or No More Drama or Stankonia. 

Wouldn’t it be crazy if music didn’t cost a thing? How Music Got Free sets up a kind of oral history, led by Stephen Gill, as he sets the scene for an internet in the before times, when online communities were formed around the ripping of software and computer games like Doom. By 1995 and the evolution and wider distribution of MP3 technology, many of these communities had transitioned into sharing music files in this new compressed form, which gave record companies pause. “Basically every song is copyrighted,” Hilary Rosen says in a recording of a phone call between the CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America and Napster. “We’re going to sue you. This is not going to last.” But not only did it last, the legal action only made file sharing services like Napster, Kazaa, and Limewire more popular. And suddenly Eminem was going on MTV to goad his fans into ignoring the thriving free market in MP3s in favor of making physical album purchases.

Was the record industry prepared for this shift? No. Were they willing to roll with the changes? Also no. At least not at first, when their measures at management of the issue failed completely.  How Music Got Free establishes a power dynamic pitting industry voices against the MP3 enthusiasts, who in interviews continue to not really care about how far their actions caused other peoples’ bottom lines to slip. But the economic damage was real, Gill says. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that they were the ones running the entire music distribution platform.” And if the MP3 ripping scene could get access to the music the second it left the studio – like via a CD manufacturing facility in a tiny southern town – their powers of disruption would be that much more formidable.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Antisocial Network: From Memes to Mayhem contends that 4Chan, another influential corner of an earlier form of the internet, was a progenitor of today’s unceasing diet of misinformation. And The Playlist is a Netflix series that documents the inspiration for and creation of Swedish music streaming giant Spotify.

Our Take: “Have you heard of this thing, ‘MP3’?” (Halting pronunciation: “Emm Pee Three?”) It is 1997-ish, and MTV host John Norris is surrounded by the members of NSYNC, who are all rocking frosted tips, blocky oversized tees, puka shell necklaces, and other height-of-the-nineties finery. It’s Chris Kirkpatrick who speaks up first. “I just got it,” he tells Norris, apparently referring to the concept of downloading MP3s for free off the internet. It’s a trend so new to the established marketplace for music that neither the record label’s latest custom-built boy band nor a music journalist and prominent MTV host can speak knowledgeably about what it even is. The energy in a clip like this really nails one of the most interesting points in How Music Got Free, which is the egalitarian nature of an industry-wide disruption which came from below. The members of a boy band marketing juggernaut and the status of MTV as a promotional apparatus, two things which had nothing to do with the new center of power, which had shifted largely into the hands of consumers, diffused across expanses of fiber optic cable.

What’s less interesting here is Eminem and Timbaland and 50 Cent and others restating their late 90s grips about file sharing stealing a chunk of their profits. Eminem is correct in ticking off all of the people his music generates a paycheck for. It’s not just him, but lists and lists of professionals, like producers and engineers and label execs and everyday record industry staffers, who benefit from something like The Eminem Show moving as many units as possible. But as How Music Got Free pushes into the litigation zone, and the FBI gets involved, and we see the same old footage of Lars Ulrich from Metallica complaining about MP3s, the argument becomes as one-sided or even as dead on arrival as it felt at the time.  

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: The biggest labels and the most powerful forces in the record industry had pledged war against the MP3-ripping pirates. But they never considered that their biggest problem might be just one person, living in one tiny town, with a certain kind of specific access. “They all thought they’d seen the worst,” Method Man says. “But Dell’s plan was just taking shape.”  

Sleeper Star: Method Man narrating How Music Got Free adds some spark to proceedings that otherwise play out as a rather dry back-and-forth, with artists and record company financial interests on one side and former teen hackers describing their methods on the other.   

Most Pilot-y Line: “While the record industry was on their CD hustle” – 600 to 700 million units shipped and sold per year – “A group of music-obsessed teenagers armed with dial-up internet were about to change the game.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. It’s an interesting chapter, the rise of file sharing, and music becoming untethered from the record industry’s traditional means of distribution, especially considering where we’re at today. The insight in How Music Got Free is how that shift was generated from below.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.