Reddit reviews How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

The companies have large security for all people going in and out of the facilities and track production very well to ensure all copies are accounted for. Before you enter and leave you go through airport like security detectors to see if you're carrying metal or cds out.

How people would get out copies is pretty cool.

You'd take one off the line and tag it as defective and trash it, as per the process for defective cds. Then after your shift you'd slyly sneak over and take it out of the trash. But now security. How to get it past an airport scanner? Be a redneck! You wear a large metal cowboy belt buckle, secretly hide the cd behind it, and when you go through security, they think it's just the big belt buckle.

A huge amount of CDs that got stolen and released online were actually just from one single guy who worked in a North Carolina cd manufacturing plant named Dell Glover. A lot of this is recounted in what is roughly the seminal book on it right now by Stephan Witt called How Music Got Free. It's a great read and ties back how the trends in music changed from physical to digital and the story of stealing pre-release cds is one of the driving forces

There's plenty of research, data and interviews with current musicians and label owners in these books:

https://www.amazon.com/Freeloading-Insatiable-Content-Starves-Creativity/dp/1935928996
https://www.amazon.com/Free-Ride-Parasites-Destroying-Business/dp/0307739775
https://www.amazon.com/How-Music-Got-Free-Obsession/dp/0143109340

Steely Dan for an example stopped touring in 1974, they broke up in 1980. They were able to sustain themselves and pay studio musicians for 6 years with JUST record sales.

A band like Steely Dan could be viewed as indie imo despite selling millions, they do not have a lot of catchy songs, they never catered to their audience and became less and less catchy as their career progressed.

Bands that are viewed as indie today (St. Vincent, Mac DeMarco, whatever) would have had a lot more money if they had careers in the 70s/80s/90s, they wouldn't have to tour so much. They'd lead more balanced lives and focus on songwriting more and not just endless touring.

In the UK you had a band like 10cc which is similar to Steely Dan, they didn't tour much, just lived in the studio and made records. Not possible anymore.

So, ok, we lost these kind of studio bands. What did we gain exactly? Amateurs being able to upload their bad songs on Soundcloud and get fake likes/comments from bots?

Sure it is cheaper to record today, but since there is little money in music, a musician has to play the role of the songwriter, recording engineer, arranger, mixer, businessman. He can't afford to get help from people who specialize in recording, or writing lyrics, or arranging. People who are amazing at songwriting, lyrics, recording and mixing all at the same time and extremely rare.

Now a guy that just wants to write songs has to waste his time learning how to record cos' there's no music industry to support him anymore. He has to learn about how to connect stuff together, about acoustics, about some electrical stuff related to audio... In the past he could have just focused on his songs, his record label would get him help from audio engineers and producers and pay for the recording of his songs.

I am talking about bands that I personally like the music of, bands that can't exist anymore in today's music climate. How much more indie can you get than that? They were not outliers back when they were in their prime. They often lived from JUST record sales.

I don't know what kind of indie musicians you talk about? Local bands or something? I mean, every artist starts locally and if they have good enough songs and are promoted well, they start making actual money.

I'm saying that even those local bands would have been better off in the past than today, the average payout per gig today is almost the same as it was in the 90s... the money local live musicians earn hasn't even adjusted for inflation. This data is presented in one of these books I think, but there's also data about it on the net.

How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

This book is about the development and distribution of digital music files. It is a unique look at the true crime of warez and music piracy.