Amid concerns around film and concert ticket prices, a new docuseries examines the complex and still relevant origins of piracy and the consumer-art relationship.
Director Alex Stapleton's new docuseries,"How Music Got Free," examines the rise and fall of music piracy in the late '90s to the early '00s. It also raises questions about how the consumer reconciles rising costs to access their favorite music and movies today.Bootlegged blockbusters, still raking in millions at the movie theater, often came directly to them in plastic bags for cheap at the barbershop or hair salon.
Ludacris and OutKast are a few of the hip-hop artists who made up Stapleton's huge digital music library in the late '90s and early '00s — and it was all pirated music.“What I did want to pick at was this idea of what lengths the industry, or these corporate kinds of places, will go to,” she said. “It’s wild how little they won’t do. They won’t move off the dime. If they’re making money, it’s really hard for them to accept innovation and create change.
“As a Black Southerner, I loved reading a story where at the center of it was this Black guy from Shelby, North Carolina,” Stapleton said. “And it was a hip-hop story.” Not like any era is really an ideal time to be convicted of a federal crime, but, as Stapleton said, “No one understood.” She grappled with that a bit before she got to a more pointed question: “How is he any different from Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or Paul Allen?”
Stapleton’s valid insight there is especially striking because much of it isn’t in the docuseries. It is inferred, but there isn’t a voice that really puts this into such a sharp perspective. “The reason why the world got so many leaks that were hip-hop-related was because what kept the lights on at the plant, for the most part, was printing Universal CDs,” she explained. “And specifically, all of Interscope’s artists were printed there.”“The rise in ’92, ’93, when Dre put out ‘The Chronic,’ that was kind of the first album that white kids started to listen to in suburbia,” she said, agreeing with my earlier point. “But it only got bigger and crazier. The numbers were insane.
Eminem, one of the most-leaked artists at the time, is interviewed in and is a producer of"How Music Got Free."She argued that that would have been the perfect time to have a more complex conversation about what was happening and what needed to happen: “Because we could have potentially figured out some new shit, but nobody really wanted to have that conversation.”
“I think it’s cool and interesting for Eminem to kind of own up and not try to switch the narrative,” Stapleton said. “It was important to show how not cool he was with piracy and leaks.”That’s real. We’re still grappling with the consumer-artist-corporate entertainment relationship today as at-home technology continues to rapidly evolve.
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