How Music Got Free Director & Producer Break Down Method Man-Narrated Piracy Documentary [SXSW]

How Music Got Free is a new documentary making its debut at 2024’s South By Southwest festival. Director Alexandria Stapleton works from the 2015 book by journalist Stephen Witt on the digital revolution of the 1990s, when music piracy was at its peak. The project explores the clash between the classic physical distribution model and the move to digital media sometimes known as the third industrial revolution. With a voiceover by Method Man and various interviews with artists such as Eminem, 50Cent, Rocsi Diaz, and Timbaland, How Music Got Free will be distributed on Paramount+.

In 1999, the music industry was riding high as listeners paid a premium to move their collection from vinyl to CD. In this climate, an online web of music piracy developed as high-quality rips of CDs were uploaded, sometimes before the official release date. At the heart of this illegal trade was Dell Glover, a CD factory worker from Shelby, North Carolina, who used his access to CD manufacturing and camaraderie with an online group of teen hackers to subvert the traditional distribution model and release music freely to the masses. This story of haves and have-nots follows the rise and fall of piracy groups, FBI investigations and legal battles, and the impact of piracy on the executives and the artists whose music was being pirated.

Screen Rant interviewed the creative minds behind How Music Got Free, Stapleton and Witt, at SXSW where the film premiered. Witt discussed the genesis of the book and how a trip to Europe led him to discover the man at the heart of music piracy in the ’90s, while Stapleton shared her journey from finding the book to the documentary hitting screens.

The Making Of How Music Got Free

Screen Rant: Congrats on How Music Got Free, which is just shining really insightful new light on something that a lot of us lived through, but had really no idea what was happening at the time or since. Stephen, let’s start with you. I know this is based on a book you wrote. What can you say about what first drew you to this subject? Why did you want to explore the digital music revolution and all the good and bad that came with it?

Stephen Witt: Yeah, well, I had pirated a ton of music. [Laughs] I just had a ton of music – like 10,000 albums on my hard drives. This was before the cloud, and I was like, “How did all this get here? What is an mp3? How is this possible? What happened?” And as I researched it, I realized almost no one had an answer.

I went to Germany and interviewed the guys who invented the mp3. but I could see that there was something that they weren’t telling me. And what had happened is that the mp3 was initially a flop, so they just posted it online for public download for free. All these teenage boys started to experiment with it and started to form these loose digital gangs that raced each other to be the first to post pirated music online. As they did that, they got further and further into the music industry supply chain until they found a guy who was actually working inside the CD manufacturing plant. That guy was Dell Glover, and he became the centerpiece for the book and the centerpiece for the [film].

Alex, tell us a little bit about how you came on board this project and your own personal connection.

Alex Stapleton: I have a really long history with Spring Hill and have been doing docks for them for a while. They got the rights to Stephen’s book, and Jamal Henderson, who’s an exec there, and Phil Byron were like, “This feels like a project that you would probably like. Read the book.”

I read the book and fell in love with it. I remember reading the book, and I didn’t even have the gig yet, but I was taking notes of things like, “I want to know more about this person.” And it was just so exciting because it was like a thriller, but no one knows that they’re in the thriller. Then I met Stephen and we got along really well. Then we started the five-year journey of making this project. I’m excited to be here and to finally be sharing it with the world.

The Secrets Behind How Music Got Free

You tease the secret history of the music biz that they don’t want you to know. I don’t know how spoilery you guys want to get, but who are they? And why don’t they want you to know?

Stephen Witt: They are the executives, particularly at Universal Music Group. It’s now run by Lucian Grainge , but at the time was run by Doug Morris. Doug was a very canny businessman; he cornered the market on rap music. Almost all of the rappers – 50 Cent, Eminem, Dr. Dre, Tupac Shakur – were all on this one overarching corporate label, but they had a leak inside their plant. So, as they rolled up all the rappers, it meant that more and more stuff went through this one CD manufacturing plant, making Dell the inside man, just giving him more and more stuff to leak to the public.

Once that was revealed, I don’t think that they wanted people to know that. I don’t think they wanted people to know that they’d had this long-standing security hole, including their own artists. I came to Doug, back in 2015, when he was still in charge of Universal, which was the biggest music company in the world. It was a tough conversation because I could see there were certain portions of this that were embarrassing to Universal.

Alex, what were you most surprised about learning throughout this process?

Alex Stapleton: To piggyback off what he was talking about, it was the hubris of the industry and how these technology cycles are still hitting the powers that be in the same way. Film is really interesting right now; technology is changing at such a fast rate, and it’s like, “What lessons can we learn from the past to embrace technology before it’s too late, and it just gets totally disrupted, and you and it burns all down, and you have to rebuild?”

I think just knowing that, hearing stories about record execs being shoved into a room after the Grammys, and the head of the RAA Hilary Rosen telling them, “Guys, we have a problem. This is really serious. There’s this thing called Napster, and all the kids are on it.” Name a song, any song, and she could play it right there. And execs were like, “Cool. Okay, I’m hungry. Are we going to lunch now?” And just totally ignoring that when it was the end. That was really crazy to me.

But I think the biggest surprise for me was understanding, as a filmmaker, the brilliant technological brains of these kids. They’re not Bill Gates or Zuckerberg; it’s not all the famous people that we talk about over and over and over again. These are just normal kids from all over the country, of different socioeconomic classes, that we’re really changing the game. The biggest one is Dell Glover. He didn’t even go to college. He’s a high school graduate graduate out of Shelby, North Carolina, from a lineage of black farmers in the country. And the fact that he was this prodigy. As a Southerner, and as a black filmmaker, it was really exciting to challenge what we think about when we think about tech geniuses.

Stephen Witt: It was so fascinating. The music industry was just refusing to invest in the future and refusing to build the next generation of supply. They were making so much money off compact discs, and they just couldn’t let it go. So, guys like Dell, and teenagers around the country built it for them.

They were literally analog in a digital world. They could have monetized so much earlier than they did.

Stephen Witt: The racks of CDs at the mall? To the record executives, that was inventory. That was valuable inventory. But to the engineers into the pirates, it was just data, and they only needed one to reproduce it a million times across the planet. The record industry just wouldn’t build it, so these kids built it for them.

Bringing Method Man & More Into How Music Got Free

How did Mr. Method Man from Wu-Tang Clan come on board?

Alex Stapleton: Well, I have to give love to our partners at Paramount+, our execs, Malik Johnson and Mike Miniaci. Method Man came out of a lunch meeting with us, and we felt like it needed a narrator. Again, because it’s this weird story of the FBI, the music industry, the pirates, and the artists, but they don’t understand that each ecosystem really exist or how they’re impacting each other. So, I felt like a narrator was really important to become the dramatic irony and the voice that the audience could go on this journey with.

We were trying to think of the best person, that kind of would also feel a bit [relevant] now but also back then. And out of that lunch meeting, we figured that Method Man would be the dopest narrator ever. I was like, “Yeah, like we’re gonna get Method Man.” And then we got him. And he was amazing. The VO sessions were really amazing because he would record the VO, but then he would give us the sidebars of how he was impacted by Dell. He’s like, “This is the man who destroyed everything!” He’s like, “I can’t believe I’m doing this guy’s movie.” But it was really cool.

Stephen Witt: It was fascinating to me. When I was writing the book, I didn’t have access to 50 Cent and Eminem. I was writing independently. But with this project, we did get that access. It’s amazing to see how much Dell, a factory worker, and these kids around the country impacted the livelihoods and even artistic choices of these artists. That’s the thing that, to me, brought this documentary to the next level.

Meeting Dell, and then seeing that old footage of Eminem going, “Whoever leaked my record. I’m gonna, I’m gonna punch him in the face!” Were you guys worried about Dell’s safety?

Alex Stapleton: [Laughs] No, they had gotten over it. Eminem is a producer on this, so it’s all love. They’re not all gonna be in the same room at the same time. They haven’t met!

But I think that, for every artist that I went and sat down with, from Timbaland to 50 Cent, to Emonem, to even Jimmy Iovine whose business got really rocked… I think that there was an instant gut punch of, “Are you serious? This is who this is the story is about? It wasn’t my producer, it wasn’t DJ or whatever.” But it quickly went from that to like, “Damn!” Just respect for how genius this operation was. How can you hate on these kids?

How intense was it to shoot with Eminem? He seems a little intense.

Alex Stapleton: He’s great. I was in Detroit and went to him, and it was awesome. Paul Rosenberg is also part of this project, and it was cool just kicking it with them. Every interview was nostalgic for them, and they were getting triggered by the PTSD that they had from their albums coming out before they were ready.

On the flip side, I think what he brought to the table was really understanding that he’s an artist. It wasn’t that he didn’t want kids to have stuff for free, necessarily. I mean, there is a cost to doing business. But at the same time, that’s when albums were art. You have someone like Eminem, who finally gets to a place in his career where he can make his album because he’s been listening to Dre and N.W.A. and whatever records he came up on. It’s like, “Now I get my opportunity,” and it like comes out before it’s ready.