It all started with the curious mind of Dell Glover in 1994. Glover was a temporary employee at the PolyGram factory which manufactured the new sensation of compact-disk. Glover trying to land a full time position with the company found himself at employee parties giving himself a chance to socialize with managers. Glover noticed that the music being played was smuggled music form the plant.
Growing up Glover was always fascinated with the in’s & out’s of computers. When Glover purchased a computer he became interested in chat-rooms and soon accustomed to piracy focused rooms. There was a growing culture where hackers specialized in software. Anyone who knew about the underground culture called it “The Scene.” The Scene was filled with a ton of groups that raced each other to be the first to put new material on the internet. In 1996 the first MP3 piracy group emerged. CDA or Compress ‘Da Audio’s first official release was “Until It Sleeps,” by Metallica. When Tupac’s “All Eyez on Me” came through the assembly line later that night Glover was listening to the MP3 of “California Love.” He couldn’t help but wonder what they point of buying these $14.00 CD’s when the world could have all the music for free? He obviously didn’t see the writing and producing as a difficult job, but more like a free service for the people.
The SeaGram Company announced they will be purchasing PolyGram from Philips and merging with the power house Universal Music Group. At the time Universal was stacked with artist like Jay Z, Eminem, Dre, and Cash Money! A few months after the huge merge of companies Napster debuted sharing tons of music files across internet waves. This ignited a devastating loss in the music industry billion dollar revenue from CD’s sales. Leaking of albums brought top-flight security to the factory Glover was working at. Glover decided to pay younger/temporary employees to smuggle the CD’s for him. Glover used his connects with the internet chat-rooms to get movie files and he pressed them up and sold the bootleg movies out of his backseat. Through the chat-rooms Glover ended up meeting a top-site gatekeeper known as “Kali.” The trade off from uploading this leaked music to Kali was getting access to all the top-sites, meaning never having to pay for media again.
In 2001 Glover was the King of leaking pre-released music. Glover was the mastermind behind the Lil Wayne “500 Degreez” and Jay Z’s “The Blueprint.” Followed by the release of 50 cent’s official debut “Get Rich or Die Tryin,” which was the biggest selling album of the year. Glover built a team to sell disk for him. The money began to flood in and he began buying gifts for friends and enjoying the benefits of his illegal income.
When Glover was leaving work at 7:00 AM on Thursday, September 13th, he was greeted by 3 member’s of the Cleveland County sheriff’s department with guns drawn. He was told his apartment was already being raided. October 2009 Glover pleaded guilty to one count of felony conspiracy to commit copyright infringement in Virginia. Glover ended up serving a 3-month sentence in prison. The attorneys for the Department of Justice wrote, “RNS was the most pervasive and infamous Internet piracy group in history.” I’m sure Tat Wza & anybody younger then 30 that loves music and technology could trace music in their mp3 library back to Glover. All of this illegal activity that caused the music industry to loose a ton of money has lead us to this new platform where CD’s are basically irrelevant and mp3’s and music streaming are crowned the front runners of distribution.
Written By: Golden Brown
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