Interesting Music History Lesson

The music industry has changed a lot over the past decades.  The way artists used to make money off their material has almost disappeared; the CD no longer holds the power it used to have.  In an article in this next week’s New Yorker Magazine (April 27 issue), Stephen Witt wrote a technology piece called “The Man Who Broke The Music Business.”

In the early 1990s, a man named Dell Glover was working in a CD manufacturing plant in Kings Mountain, North Carolina.  In this plant, CDs were packaged, shrink wrapped, and boxed so they would be ready for shipping.  Grover was an avid technology fan, every new advancement that happened in the technology industry in the 1990s, he would take part of.  So when the “Scene” or “Warez Scene” began working on MP3s, Grover started taking part of the pirated media file sharing world.  In an ironic turn of events, Grover became part of pirated file sharing on the Internet, something that was directly going to affect the CD industry, from which he had been making a living for years. 

After the company Glover worked for was purchased by Seagram Company and merged with the Universal Music Group, production lines at the plant Glover worked at were now manufacturing half a million CDs each day.  However, this growth would not last long.  After programs such as Napster came in, Universal’s (and all labels) started suffering from the problem of having CDs leaked before their scheduled release date.

By this time, Glover and a coworker became members of Rabid Neurosis (RNS), an elite pre-release leaks sharing network.  RNS was pirating entire albums before their scheduled release date from many of the many major labels.  As one of their best sources, Glover became “the world’s leading leaker of pre-release music.” Ripping hit albums weeks before anyone else could hear them, RNS distributed this music to all “Scene” members.  Some of the music he ripped included hits by Lil Wayne, Jay Z, 3 Doors Down, Ashanti, Ja Rule, Nelly, Blink-182, and Eminem.

Glover was making a lot of money and kept smuggling music out of the plant and sharing it across the globe.  By 2006, Glover was known to have leaked around 2,000 CDs and was not afraid of being caught.   After RNS was shut down, Glover continued sourcing a leaking albums from the plant to different groups.

In September 2007, Glover was surprised by the Cleveland County Police when leaving work, while the FBI was searching his home. He was indicted on one count of felony conspiracy to commit copyright infringement to which he pleaded guilty.