How Music got free centers on three main stories- the struggles and eventual fortune-making victory of a team of German researchers, led by Karlheinz Brandenburg, who created the MP3 format, the success and missteps of Doug Morris, a powerful record exec making an easy ten million dollars a year, and the misadventures of Dell Glover, a CD packing plant employee who linked in with a group of fanatical online pirates and leaked hundreds of albums online. I raced through it, eating up Witt's story of research, money, theft and technological disruption. This is an informative, fascinating window into the dark arts of the recording industry and the collapse in record company sales that online piracy precipitated. Remember the bad old days of buying CDs? When an album cost a fortune and buying one was a big deal? How Music got free will take you back to that era, explain why it ended, and make you glad that it's gone.
In the page-turning tradition of writers like Michael Lewis and Lawrence Wright, Witt’s deeply-reported first book introduces the unforgettable characters-inventors, executives, factory workers, and smugglers-who revolutionized an entire artform, and reveals for the first time the secret underworld of media pirates that transformed our digital lives.Īn irresistible never-before-told story of greed, cunning, genius, and deceit, How Music Got Free isn’t just a story of the music industry-it’s a must-read history of the Internet itself. Through these interwoven narratives, Witt has written a thrilling book that depicts the moment in history when ordinary life became forever entwined with the world online - when, suddenly, all the music ever recorded was available for free. Journalist Stephen Witt traces the secret history of digital music piracy, from the German audio engineers who invented the mp3, to a North Carolina compact-disc manufacturing plant where factory worker Dell Glover leaked nearly two thousand albums over the course of a decade, to the high-rises of midtown Manhattan where music executive Doug Morris cornered the global market on rap, and, finally, into the darkest recesses of the Internet. It’s about the greatest pirate in history, the most powerful executive in the music business, a revolutionary invention and an illegal website four times the size of the iTunes Music Store. How Music Got Free is a riveting story of obsession, music, crime, and money, featuring visionaries and criminals, moguls and tech-savvy teenagers. What happens when an entire generation commits the same crime?
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