How Music Got Free

By Stephen Witt

Subjects: Downloading of data, Corrupt practices, Commerce, BUSINESS & ECONOMICS, General, New York Times bestseller, Music and the Internet, Sound recording industry, Music trade, Sound recordings, pirated editions, New York Times reviewed, Sound recordings, Business ethics & social responsibility, MP3 (Audio coding standard), Marketing, Sales & Selling, Economic aspects, Mp3 (audio coding standard), History, nyt:culture=2015-08-09, Pirated editions

Description: This book 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. Witt 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. - Publisher.