Audio Streaming & Piracy

The rise of music piracy reflects an out of touch industry.

Today at lunch Michael told us about time he was working for a company that was trying to sell a sound system to Warner Brothers . This was back around the year 2000 and Warner Brothers wanted a secure sound system that would allow all those concerned with a project to be able to listen to the dailies ( dailies  are just whatever was recorded that day). The solution was a pair of programs that transferred the digital sound files from the master computer to the listener's computer. The programs allowed the user to start playing the recording at any point in the recording. It basically looked the same system used by YouTube  and Spotify , but this was back in the year 2000. Warner Brothers was very concerned about security (they didn't want anyone making black market copies), so the receiver program had to bypass the Windows sound system and talk directly to the hardware. Of course, you could just set up a microphone and record the audio from the speakers. However, the receiver program added a high frequency squeal to the output signal. Presumably it was above a human's hearing range, but low enough the speakers could reproduce it. The idea being that if a pirated copy showed up, they had evidence it was stolen. In addition, they encoded the user's number in that high pitched squeal so they would be able to identify the culprit.

I asked Google about this (pasted the entire above text) and got a long response. Here's a couple of items extracted from that response:

The system Michael described was incredibly forward-thinking for the year 2000, effectively combining modern streaming architecture with strict digital rights management (DRM) to prevent and track piracy.

🔇 The "Silent" Tracker: Audio Watermarking

The high-frequency squeal Michael mentioned is a forensic technique called psychoacoustic watermarking .

• Human Hearing vs. Speakers: Healthy young adults can generally hear frequencies up to 20,000 Hz (20 kHz). Standard audio equipment and speakers can easily reproduce sounds up to 20 kHz or 22 kHz. By placing the squeal in the ultra-high spectrum (e.g., around 18 kHz to 21 kHz), it becomes effectively inaudible to most busy executives and producers listening to dailies, but it is still physically blasting out of the speakers.

⏳ The Streaming Pioneer

Building a system in 2000 that allowed arbitrary scrubbing (clicking to play at any point in the timeline) over the internet was a massive technical feat. Broadband internet was in its infancy, and most of the world was still on dial-up. They essentially built a secure, private precursor to Spotify and YouTube technology years before the infrastructure for those platforms existed on a consumer scale.