How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy

by Stephen Witt

  Rowling’s lawyers passed Ellis’ contact information to the police the same day they received it. They also passed it on to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. The IFPI was the global counterpart to the United States’ RIAA. It lobbied global trade organizations for stricter copyright protection, certified gold and platinum records internationally, and ran its own antipiracy unit staffed with seasoned detectives pulled from Interpol and Scotland Yard. The private dicks weren’t especially interested in collectivist arguments about the nature of private property. They simply saw a site that incentivized music leaking while pulling in a hell of a lot of cash. And when they saw the username “Oink,” they didn’t see a revolutionary or an idealist—they saw a racketeer.

  But if Oink was a criminal, he wasn’t a very good one. Until recently, he had been running the server from his house, with his IP address available for anyone to see. He had logged all site activity, with users’ upload and download histories stored right next to their names and email. And with two seconds of research into the Internet’s domain name registry, you could get Oink’s real name: “Alan Ellis.”

  The evidence trail amounted to the easiest bust in the history of online piracy. On Tuesday, October 23, 2007, Ellis woke before dawn to prepare for another day in the IT pit at the chemical company in downtown Middlesbrough. He took a shower in his apartment’s shared bathroom, then returned to his bedroom, where his girlfriend, having spent the night, was still asleep. As he did every morning, he logged into Oink as administrator, checked the server logs, and read the overnight messages from his deputized lieutenants. Then the door slammed open and a dozen police officers swarmed into his room.

  All ten of Ellis’ bank accounts were frozen simultaneously. Across the country in Manchester, his father was inexplicably arrested as well, and charged with money laundering. Alan Ellis’ home computer was seized as evidence. So were the Holland servers, which contained the IP and email addresses of all 180,000 Oink members. Unlike the Pirate Bay administrators, Ellis had not planned for this contingency, and the torrents Oink served went dark.

  The police grilled Ellis for over an hour in his apartment. He was reluctant to speak. The sun came up outside. He was invited to the police station for further conversation. Looking to make a show of force, the cops had alerted the UK’s tabloid press, who had been waiting outside Ellis’ building since daybreak. Handcuffed, he was escorted from his bedroom and into the glare of the photographers’ flashing lights.

  CHAPTER 17

  Glover’s duffel bag was nearly full. By the end of 2006 he had leaked nearly 2,000 CDs. He was no longer afraid of getting caught. He could tell that, unlike his old Universal bosses, the new plant management at EDC couldn’t care less. Despite all their public complaints about the leaks, Universal’s supply chain was less secure than ever.

  Right before the handover, Universal had once again upgraded the production lines, and the plant could now produce a million compact discs a day. But that was the final improvement. The plant was now a wasting asset, and was being run accordingly. Since the handover, no new equipment had been installed. There had been a hiring freeze. Basic maintenance was being left undone. Morale was low and a lot of the employees were starting to look for new work. Still, Glover was getting his overtime shifts in, as overseeing the packaging line was ever more difficult. Nearly every major release now came in multiple editions, with bonus DVDs and foldout posters and deluxe album art.

  None of this mattered to Kali. His approach was as mercenary as that of Doug Morris—the most important leak of the year was the album that sold the most copies, and the chart was the only thing that mattered. In 2006 RNS had once again sourced the top leak of the year, weaseling their way inside Sony to pull Some Hearts, the debut album from American Idol winner Carrie Underwood. They had added to this with leaks from Rascal Flatts, James Blunt, and Kelly Clarkson. The shift in audiences—from urban to rural, from young men to older women, from teenagers to their parents—was telling. For the major labels, the most important sales demographics in music were those who didn’t know how to share.

  RNS didn’t stop there. The campaign of infiltration was complete, and the entire industry, from the largest corporate player to the smallest indie, was now lousy with RNS plants. In 2006, the group leaked more than 4,000 releases from across the musical spectrum. The names on the NFOs that year read like the invite list for the Grammys: Akon, Ani DiFranco, Barry Manilow, Bette Midler, Beyoncé, Billy Ray Cyrus, Bob Seger, Built to Spill, Busta Rhymes, the Buzzcocks, Christina Aguilera, DJ Shadow, Elvis Costello, the Foo Fighters, the Game, Ghostface Killah, Gucci Mane, Hilary Duff, Hot Chip, the Indigo Girls, Insane Clown Posse, Jars of Clay, Jimmy Buffett, John Legend, Kenny Rogers, Korn, LCD Soundsystem, Madonna, Morrissey, My Chemical Romance, Neil Young, Nelly Furtado, Nick Cave, Nine Inch Nails, Oasis, Omarion, Pearl Jam, Pharrell, Pitbull, Primus, Prince, Public Enemy, Regina Spektor, Rick Ross, Rihanna, the Roots, the Scissor Sisters, Shakira, Stereolab, Sting, Taylor Swift, Three 6 Mafia, Toby Keith, Tony Bennett, Tool, and “Weird Al” Yankovic.

  The scale of activity was taxing, and many members of RNS were outgrowing it. When the music Scene had gotten its start in 1996, most of the participants were teenagers. Now those same pioneers were approaching 30, and the glamour was fading. Plus, the leakers tended to decline in value as they grew older. They outgrew their jobs at college radio stations or found more lucrative careers than music journalism. They gained a better appreciation of the legal risks, or accumulated undesirable baggage like social lives or scruples.

  Listening to hundreds of new releases a year could lead to a kind of jaded auditory cynicism. The uniform blandness of the corporate sound wasn’t helping. The musicians all used auto-tune to pitch-correct their voices; the songwriters all copied the last big hit; the same handful of producers worked on every track. Glover didn’t connect with rap in the way he used to. Tony Dockery had been born again, and listened only to gospel. Simon Tai still hung around the chat channel, but he hadn’t leaked an album in years. Even Kali seemed a little bored. There were no more worlds left to conquer.

  Meanwhile, the risks were greater than ever. Between Interpol, the FBI, and the IFPI and the RIAA’s internal antipiracy squads, there were now at least four separate teams of investigators working to catch them. Earlier that year, over chat, Kali had told Saunders that he was going to visit some old friends from another Scene group who were now in federal prison. After the visit, Saunders thought Kali seemed rattled.

  A few days later, Kali called Glover and ordered him to do something unusual. He told him to turn off the password protection on his wireless router. Kali explained that, normally, you locked up your router to protect yourself from cybercriminals. But in this case, Kali explained, we’re the cybercriminals. If we leave our wireless routers insecure, we can argue in court that all the evidence that traces back to our IP addresses proves nothing. Anyone could be on the network. This will give us plausible deniability in case we are ever caught.

  Glover did as instructed, but the defense seemed awfully flimsy. He saw the move as evidence of Kali’s persecution complex, and he was getting tired of taking all these ridiculous precautions. But other members of the group thought the actions were justified. It was obvious that they were bringing a ton of heat upon themselves, and senior members of RNS were beginning to publicly wonder if it wasn’t time to walk away. The years 2004, 2005, and 2006 had been legendary. RNS was now the most successful music release group in history, and their dominance was so total that many of their competitors had simply given up. If they left now, they could walk away on top.

  Glover, too, had been thinking about retiring from the Scene. He had started leaking when he was 25. Now he was 33. His appearance over this span had changed little: he’d worn the same haircut for ten years, dressed in the same screen-print T-shirts and blue jeans, and his face showed little evidence of age. But his perception of himself was changing. Looking back at the roughrid
er of his youth, he saw a person he did not understand. He no longer remembered why he had been so attracted to the street bikes, or why he’d felt it necessary to own a gun. He bore the evidence of that vanished mindset on his arm, in the form of the grim reaper walking a pit bull, a tattoo that Glover now found incredibly, impossibly stupid.

  Family life appealed to him. For years, he and Karen had raised children from previous relationships. Now they had one of their own. With a newborn baby at home, Glover was working a little less. He went to church more often. He enjoyed spending time with his children and didn’t want to jeopardize all of that. Plus, the DVD hustle was starting to die down. The torrent networks had caught up to the Scene, and the leaks were publicly available within seconds of being posted to the topsites. Even through his connections, he no longer had a competitive edge, and his income from bootlegging had dropped to a few hundred bucks a week.

  And then there was the Navigator. It had been his lifelong dream to own a tricked-out car, but now, after just two years, Glover was starting to feel a little silly driving around Shelby in neon lights and floaters. Using overtime income and his savings from the DVD hustle and the pirate movie server, he purchased a replacement vehicle, a new, fully loaded Ford F-150. The king of the Club Baha parking lot was ready to trade in his crown for the slippers and rake of the suburban dad.

  Glover began to make his feelings known to Kali. We’ve been doing this shit for a long time, he said in their phone calls. We never got caught. Maybe it’s time to stop. Surprisingly, Kali agreed. For him, too, the attraction of the Scene was fading, and, perhaps alone in the group, he understood the lengths that law enforcement was willing to go to bring them down.

  Then, in January 2007, one of RNS’ European topsites mysteriously vanished. The server, located in Hungary and containing several terabytes of pirated files, began refusing all connections, and the hosting company that ran it didn’t respond to the service tickets. Kali capitulated. There were just too many variables now, too much attention. He ordered the group shut down. RNS’ final leak, released on January 19, 2007, was Fall Out Boy’s Infinity on High, sourced from Dell Glover inside the plant. The NFO accompanying it included a brief parting message:

  This is our final release. Enjoy!

  After 11 years and 20,000 leaks, RNS was finally done. The last day was bittersweet. The chat channel was busy, as dozens of former members from years past flooded in to pay their respects. The members reminisced about past friendships and old exploits. Although there remained a high degree of anonymity among the group’s membership base, many friendships had formed. The participants had come of age in the Scene, and it was, for many members, a private world they carried inside themselves. Dockery, logging in as “StJames,” started changing his handle, over and over, in tribute to names long past. As the final moment beckoned, a sense of melancholy prevailed, even though there was widespread agreement that the time had come to step away. Then the #RNS channel was closed, forever.

  For Glover, it was an opportunity to put childish things behind him. He remained, as always, a shadowy figure, a peripheral member of the group but also their most important asset. He had felt, toward the end, a sense of relief of finally getting out from Kali’s thumb. A return to normalcy beckoned, and he embraced it.

  Within three months he was back. Some inexpressible urge came over him, some obscure desire to stay involved, and by April 2007 he was once again leaking CDs from the plant. There was no economic point to this anymore, but he simply couldn’t let go. As the chat channel was gone, he logged on to AOL Instant Messenger and contacted Patrick Saunders directly.

  Saunders had known of Glover’s existence, but they had never chatted before. It was another example of how isolated Kali had kept Glover—though they’d been in the same releasing group for four years, Saunders didn’t even know Glover’s screen name. Via private chat, Glover asked if Saunders could put him in touch with any other Scene releasing groups. Saunders said yes, and referred him to “RickOne,” the head of Old Skool Classics. The introduction came with Saunders’ strongest recommendation.

  Somehow Kali got word, and in July he called Glover again. He hadn’t been able to give up either. I heard you’re back in the game, he said. Well, I am too. RNS may be dead, but the leaks will continue. The new group will be downsized to only the most trusted members: just you, me, Dockery, and a couple of the Europeans. Maybe KOSDK and Fish. Maybe Saunders. We’ll continue to leak, but under random, three-letter acronyms. Our group will be so secret it won’t even have a name. We’ve spent years building this network and we have access to the best topsites on the globe. We can’t give it up now.

  Glover was skeptical. Not for the first time he wondered about what really motivated Kali to do this. Before, at least, he could point to the social recognition of his online peers. This was something Glover had never personally sought, but he understood how it might have value to a certain kind of person. Now there wasn’t even that—only some mysterious sense of personal satisfaction.

  Their behavior at this point could fairly be described as compulsive. Both had tried to quit the Scene two different times, but found themselves unable. Years later, Glover could not find the words to explain precisely what motivated him to keep going at this point. Perhaps he just wanted to make some kind of mark. Perhaps he just wanted to matter.

  Kali explained that there was one last leak they had to have. Actually, two last leaks, both of which were scheduled to come out on the same day. There was a rivalry: 50 Cent and Kanye West had scheduled the same release date for competing albums. Now they were beefing in the press about who would sell more—and Fifty said that if he didn’t win, he would retire. The beef had made the cover of Rolling Stone.

  Of course, Kali knew it was all bullshit. Better than anyone, he knew the rappers were both distributed and promoted by the same corporate parent: Vivendi Universal. What looked like an old-school hip-hop beef was actually a publicity stunt overseen by Doug Morris to boost sales. Clearly the idea was to trick consumers into thinking they were clever by buying both. Kali wasn’t fooled, and he wanted the suits at Universal to know it. RNS had leaked every release either of the artists had ever put out, including a 50 Cent album most people didn’t even know existed. The group might be shut down, but for Kali going after Fifty and Kanye was a sacred matter of tradition. Two albums: Kanye’s Graduation and 50 Cent’s Curtis. Glover told Kali he would keep an eye out for them.

  Their official release date was September 11, 2007, but the albums were first pressed at the EDC plant in mid-August. Glover obtained them through his smuggling network and listened to both. Graduation was ambitious, sampling widely from krautrock to French house, with cover art by Takashi Murakami, a daring marriage of pop rap and high art. Curtis played it safer, favoring hard-thumping club music anchored by hits like “I Get Money” and “Ayo Technology.”

  Glover enjoyed both albums, but he was in an unusual position. He alone had the power to decide the outcome of this overhyped feud. If he leaked Graduation and held on to Curtis, Kanye might lose. But if he leaked Curtis and held on to Graduation—well, he could make 50 Cent retire.

  There was also the power he had over Kali. For years, the two had been trapped in a dysfunctional relationship of distrust, exasperation, and need. Glover was sick of it all, and he finally lashed out. He decided he would release one album through Kali, and another through his new buddy RickOne at OSC. Glover listened to both albums for a second time. It was hard to choose between the two. Finally, he decided he didn’t like Kanye’s attitude, and that Graduation was just too strange. He decided to leak it first to RickOne.

  On August 30, 2007, Graduation hit the topsites of the Scene, with OSC taking credit for the leak. Within hours, Kali was calling Glover in anguish. We got beat, man! How did we get beat? Glover told him he wasn’t sure. He lied, explaining he hadn’t seen the album at the plant yet. But, he said, Curtis, yeah, I saw that at the plant today. I’ll have it to you soon. On
September 4, 2007, Kali released Curtis to the Scene. He credited the leak to the Scene group SAW—a nonsense acronym that stood for nothing.

  Universal officially released the albums on Tuesday, September 11. Despite the leaks, they both sold well. Curtis moved 600,000 copies in its first week; Graduation sold nearly a million. Kanye won the sales contest, even though Glover had leaked his album first. Glover was surprised—he’d just run a controlled experiment on the effects of leaking on music sales, an experiment that suggested that, at least in this case, the album that was leaked first actually did better. Regardless, Glover was happy with the outcome. In the days since the leak, Graduation had grown on Glover. He still didn’t like Kanye, but he felt he deserved his victory, and Fifty didn’t retire after all.

  Besides, Glover figured, they were still getting paid. Fifty had nickel-sized diamond earrings and a founder’s stake in Vitamin Water. Kanye dated runway models and wore an obnoxious gold pharaonic necklace reportedly worth 300,000 dollars. Two months earlier, Doug Morris had purchased a ten-million-dollar condominium overlooking Central Park. Dell Glover, by contrast, worked 3,000 hours a year in a factory to pay his child support, and he had beaten them all at their own game with a rubber glove and a belt buckle.

  The day after the release, Glover went to work at the EDC plant. He had a double shift lined up, lasting the entire night. Starting at 6:00 in the evening, he worked six hours regular pay, plus six hours overtime. He finished at 6:00 in the morning on September 13. As he was preparing to leave, a coworker pulled him aside. There’s someone out there, the coworker said. Someone I’ve never seen before. And they’re hanging around your truck.

  In the twilight before dawn Glover walked through the parking lot. He saw three men, strangers, who did indeed seem to be staking out his truck. As he approached the vehicle, he pulled the key fob out of his pocket. The men stared at him but took no action. Then he pressed the remote, the truck chirped, and the men drew their guns and told him to put his hands in the air.