How Music Got Free
The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy
1 of 2 copies available
One of Billboard’s 100 Greatest Music Books of All Time, by the author of The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip
What happens when an entire generation commits the same crime?
How Music Got Free is a riveting story of obsession, music, crime, and money, featuring visionaries and criminals, moguls and tech-savvy teenagers. 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.
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.
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. 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.
An 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.
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year
A New York Times Editors’ Choice
ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST BOOKS: The Washington Post • The Financial Times • Slate • The Atlantic • Time • Forbes
“[How Music Got Free] has the clear writing and brisk reportorial acumen of a Michael Lewis book.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
-
Creators
-
Publisher
-
Release date
June 16, 2015 -
Formats
-
OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781101915011
- File size: 265540 KB
- Duration: 09:13:12
-
-
Languages
- English
-
Reviews
-
Hey, you! Yes, you--with the earbuds. Want to know how your music got to you? And why it costs so little? Download this audiobook and listen. It's a fascinating story of the criminals--um, forward thinkers-- who took down the record companies by pirating music and giving it away for free. Then they got busted. No worries though--you're legal. Anyway, you'd think that a book that explains such an earth-shattering economic change could get some professional narration. Author Stephen Witt does what author-narrators do best, and that's to bring passion and unassailable subject knowledge to their performances. But Witt also brings the word-dropping, uneven pacing, and too-fast reading pitfalls that new narrators exhibit. He improves as the book moves along, and it's still worth a listen, but a more experienced storyteller would have been a better choice. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
-