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How Pirates and Factory Workers Changed Music Forever (and Made Eminem’s Life Miserable)

Filmmaker Alex Stapleton and writer Stephen Witt discuss their new documentary about the file-sharing era, 'How Music Got Free.'

It’s a remarkable turn-of-the-millennium caper centered around Dell Glover, a tech-savvy employee at Universal Music’s CD manufacturing plant in Shelby, who — with the help of some of his co-workers — smuggled out unreleased discs, ripped them to his computer, and shared the files with a mysterious figure known as Kali, leader of the most prolific digital piracy groups. Music is technically no longer free — you’re either paying about $10.99 a month or listening to ads — but streaming royalties are doled out proportionally, funneling the most money to the biggest artists; the rest are left to split the remaining pennies, and frequently, advances and expenses must first be recouped before any profits can be made. Putting further pressure on all of this, as both Stapleton and Witt note, is the rise of artificial intelligence and large language models (allegedly) trained on copyrighted materially that potentially portends an even graver existential crisis for music (and other forms of entertainment) than Napster ever conjured.

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