num_pages: 296
description: 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. Its 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 Witts deeply-reported first book introduces the unforgettable charactersinventors executives factory workers and smugglerswho 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 isnt just a story of the music industryits a must-read history of the Internet itself.
language: English
title: How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy
publisher: Viking