Even in a world dominated by torrents, an album leak is still regarded by most artists as nothing short of a tragedy. Indeed, their labels feel the same way. These days, labels both major and independent alike schedule release dates and marketing campaigns to best avoid leaks.

They rarely succeed. Albums are routinely leaked and it doesn’t matter if the artist is a superstar like Madonna or an independent band whose only claim to fame is a passing mention on Pitchfork. Everyone gets hit and they get hit hard, it’s just a matter of how badly it affects sales.

Ultimately, leaks are now regarded as a persistent issue if not an inevitable one. Of course, it wasn’t always this way. For a time, a leaked album was devastating for both an artist and their label and neither was particularly clued-in on how the situation could best be managed.

The phenomenon largely began in the ’90s, as CDs reached their peak as the preferred music format of both consumers and labels. Just about every major artist of the decade experienced a leaked release. In fact, the bigger the artist was, usually the more likely it was that their album would leak.

Eminem, Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Kanye West, Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Dr Dre, the list goes on. All of these artists were among the first generation to experience the hostile new world that digital music formats, the internet, and of course, peer-to-peer file-sharing had created.

But who was responsible for these leaks? One man who could tell you is Lydell Glover, the subject of a fascinating new profile recently published by The New Yorker. As far as The New Yorker, the FBI, and the US government are concerned, Glover is the man who broke the music business.

As an employee at the PolyGram compact-disk manufacturing plant in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, Glover had access to albums weeks ahead of their planned release date. Of course, when he first started working at PolyGram, choice cuts were few and far between.

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The company was popular in the adult contemporary genre, but the community of leakers that was rapidly growing on the web wasn’t interested in Sheryl Crow and Bryan Adams, they wanted the aforementioned superstars, the hip-hop icons and the pop legends.

Then, in 1998, Seagram Company announced that it was purchasing PolyGram from Philips and merging it with the Universal Music Group. The deal included the company’s global pressing and distribution network, including the Kings Mountain plant where Glover was now a full-time employee.

While PolyGram was cementing its reputation as an adult contemporary hub, Universal had cornered the market on hip-hop. Jay Z, Eminem, Dr. Dre, Cash Money — Glover packaged albums by all of these artists himself and he’d started a fairly lucrative business selling copies of the albums to his friends.

An interest in computers meant Glover was one of the first people to buy a CD burner back when they cost almost $600 and it also meant that he was more than aware of the invention of an eighteen-year-old college dropout from Northeastern University named Shawn Fanning.

With Napster, the album leak had officially turned from local issue, to global disaster, and the plant where Glover worked began employing new security measures to deter the thieves feeding albums to leakers.

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Even so, Glover’s contacts at the plant were still able to reliably procure leaked albums. One had even sneaked out an entire manufacturing spindle of three hundred disks. Meanwhile, Glover had created a setup consisting of a seven-burner tower, which he would use to burn leaked content sourced from the internet.

He’d also developed a friendship with a fellow employee named Tony Dockery, who had also begun bootlegging content downloaded from the web. The two shared an interest in technology and would spend hours chatting online via Internet Relay Chat (IRC).

One night, Dockery invited Glover over to his house where he introduced him to the world of “warez” (after software). For the past year or so, Dockery had been uploading pre-release leaks that Glover had been giving him to a mysterious network of online warez enthusiasts.

Dockery was a member of one of the scene’s most elite groups, Rabid Neurosis, or RNS, and Glover was about to become its most important member. Simply put, RNS was the anti-Christ that brought forth armageddon on the major labels, forging a reputation for securing the biggest leaks before anyone else.

The leader of RNS went by the handle Kali and Glover soon became his most trusted and crucial contact. Over the next few years, Glover and Kali helped RNS leak thousands of albums, including landmark releases like The Eminem Show and Nelly’s Country Grammar.

What was Glover getting out of it? Kali had access to a library of the scene’s shadowy topsites, hidden banks of every kind of content one could imagine from PlayStation games and software, to music and movies, some that wouldn’t be released for months.

Kali, a master of surveillance and infiltration, had spent the last eight years building a network of moles who managed to burrow into the supply chains of every major music label. The obsessive Kali had memorised the release schedules of every major label and kept track of mergers and corporate acquisitions.

Glover, on the other hand, was content to not only revel in the satisfaction of being able to play the latest edition of Madden NFL months before it was set to hit stores, but he was starting to make $1,500 a week burning topsite content onto discs and selling them to people.

While Kali strictly forbid anyone from selling topsite content, especially as the FBI was beginning to put pressure on leakers, Glover knew he was safe. After all, Glover was Kali’s key contact and the reputation of RNS was literally in his hands.

From 2001 on, Glover was the world’s leading leaker of pre-release music, though he claims that he never smuggled the CDs himself. Instead, he tapped a network of low-paid temporary employees who would sneak the disks past security, in exchange for cash or leaked movies.

Using the cash he made from bootleg sales, Glover began making extravagant purchases. He bought game consoles and presents for his friends and his family. He bought two new off-road quad bikes, a used Lincoln Navigator that he upgraded, and an expensive stereo.

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But while he enjoyed the lavish items that bootlegging afforded him, Glover began to grow tired of the scene. Having started in his mid-20s, he was now in his 30s, no longer interested in leaking albums and his bootlegging profits were in decline, since everyone with internet access caught on to file-sharing. Even Kali was getting bored.

Glover and Kali ended their scene activity with one final score, leaking albums by 50 Cent and Kanye West who were in the midst of the biggest rap beef of the year, all centred on whose album would sell more on a single release date. Of course, Glover knew the two were on the same label and the whole thing was a marketing stunt.

On Wednesday, 12th September 2007, Glover went to work a double shift at the plant, which lasted through the night, finishing at 7am. As he prepared to leave, a co-worker pulled him aside. “There’s someone out there hanging around your truck,” he said.

As he walked out into the light of dawn, Glover saw three men in the parking lot. As he approached his truck and pressed the remote, the men drew their guns and told him to put his hands in the air. The men were from the Cleveland County sheriff’s office. They informed him that he was under arrest and the FBI was searching his home.

In the next few months, the FBI made numerous raids on the scene, picking up many of its key figures, including Kali, who was found not guilty on copyright infringement charges brought against him, despite a testimony from Glover, who served three months in prison.

In their sentencing guidelines, the attorneys for the Department of Justice wrote, “RNS was the most pervasive and infamous Internet piracy group in history.” That reputation was built by some 20,000 leaked albums and many of them could be traced back to Glover.

In fact, as The New Yorker notes, by the mid-2000s, there was scarcely a person younger than thirty who couldn’t trace music in his or her collection to him. Glover had broken the music business, so much so that the FBI didn’t even bother to confiscate the duffel bag of disks he kept in his closet. They were, after all, worthless.

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