The man who broke the music business

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Alan

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Earlier this evening, I was scrolling through some old Facebook posts, and came across this article. Maybe a few of you have seen it already: it appeared in the New Yorker, and was published on 27 April 2015. Essentially, it is a long but beautifully composed expose of one man who got involved in internet piracy.

The New Yorker said:
One Saturday in 1994, Bennie Lydell Glover, a temporary employee at the PolyGram compact-disk manufacturing plant in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, went to a party at the house of a co-worker. He was angling for a permanent position, and the party was a chance to network with his managers. Late in the evening, the host put on music to get people dancing. Glover, a fixture at clubs in Charlotte, an hour away, had never heard any of the songs before, even though many of them were by artists whose work he enjoyed.

Later, Glover realized that the host had been d.j.’ing with music that had been smuggled out of the plant. He was surprised. Plant policy required all permanent employees to sign a “No Theft Tolerated” agreement. He knew that the plant managers were concerned about leaking, and he’d heard of employees being arrested for embezzling inventory. But at the party, even in front of the supervisors, it seemed clear that the disks had been getting out. In time, Glover became aware of a far-reaching underground trade in pre-release disks. “We’d run them in the plant in the week, and they’d have them in the flea markets on the weekend,” he said. “It was a real leaky plant.”

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This was a trip reading about. It brought back so much memories of my youth and I was utterly enthralled seeing the story of how free internet shit was free in the first place.
 
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