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How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy

Stephen Richard Witt (Goodreads Author)

4.23 · Rating details · 5,013 ratings · 587 reviews

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 ...more

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Hardcover, 296 pages

Published June 16th 2015 by Viking (first published June 4th 2015)

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Sep 28, 2016 Scott rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fic

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. 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. I raced through it, eating up Witt's story of research, money, theft and technological disruption.

How Music got free centers on th 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. 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. I raced through it, eating up Witt's story of research, money, theft and technological disruption.

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.

Witt makes the story of the German researchers and their MP3 struggle both engaging and illuminating. I’m not much of a tech head but the research around what the human ear can and cannot hear, and the ways this information was used to compress massive audio files into MP3s is fascinating.

Equally entertaining is Morris’ story, a man whose stellar career tracks the successes of the recording industry itself. Morris was a big player, and a genius at picking acts, finding talent, and selling product. In the CD era Morris’ companies kicked ass, using methods legal and not-so-legal (paying off radio DJs, arranging fake call-in requests to stations, etc.) to push albums like Lindsay Lohan’s Speak (currently sitting at a lofty 47/100 on Metacritic) to platinum.

Through Morris, Witt presents the record industry’s response to the threat of MP3s, or more accurately, their lack of a response. Like so many businesses that have been disrupted by technology (Taxi industry, I’m looking at you from the front seat of an Uber) Universal, Warners and the rest went with a classic head in the sand strategy. The recording industry ignored all the signs, portents and even direct warnings of the looming MP3 apocalypse, hoping that the private jets, 10-million-a-year salaries and complete market dominance they enjoyed would last forever. They didn't, and the industry's revenue plummeted.

The third narrative follows Glover, the emperor of music pirates, an average Carolinan working in a CD pressing factory and making in a year what Morris made in a day. Glover’s very human desires for wealth and toys ($4000 rims, baby!) lead to him stealing CDs from the plant and uploading them while running a lucrative movie bootlegging operation on the side. His rise, fall and involvement in the online scene makes for a compelling, ground level look at music piracy.

How Music got free is a sterling piece of journalistic work, an engrossing look at the end of one era in the music business and the beginning of another.

This book gave me a lot to think about. I know piracy is a problem. But the rampant profiteering of the record industry during the good times doesn’t sit right with me. Witt details that the complete cost of producing an album in the late 90s got down to less than two US dollars, yet the record companies colluded with each other to keep the retail price of CDs in the US market at seven times that amount. I personally paid thirty New Zealand Dollars a piece for albums in the late nineties and I have trouble mustering any sympathy for an industry that so greedily fleeced its customers.
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Apr 10, 2015 Susan rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Subtitled, “What happens when an entire generation commits the same crime?” this is an examination of how digital music piracy became widespread from the mid-1990’s. The author looks at three different viewpoints in depth: firstly, there is Karlheinz Brandenburg and his team, who were the driving force behind the technology of the mp3, secondly, there is Doug Morris, who, at the time when this book is set, was a middle aged businessman, head of first Warner Music Group and then MCA Music Enterta Subtitled, “What happens when an entire generation commits the same crime?” this is an examination of how digital music piracy became widespread from the mid-1990’s. The author looks at three different viewpoints in depth: firstly, there is Karlheinz Brandenburg and his team, who were the driving force behind the technology of the mp3, secondly, there is Doug Morris, who, at the time when this book is set, was a middle aged businessman, head of first Warner Music Group and then MCA Music Entertainment and, lastly, we have the amazing story of Dell Glover and Tony Dockery, two, rather lowly, employees at the PolyGram packing plant. The author freely admits that he was a member of this digital generation and he discovered that the vast majority of pirated music, at that time, came from just a few people – indeed, in some cases, he even managed to discover the very men smuggling the CD’s out of the primary organisation and making the music available online.

For those of us interested in the history of popular music, and old enough to recall life when the internet was just beginning, you will recall how quickly music was changing in the 1990’s. This story begins in 1995, when an entire generation of music lovers were upgrading their vinyl collection to compact discs. The music industry was not interested in streaming and were slow to make use of the technology – and resistant towards it. There was more profit in CD’s and they could be more controlled. However, the first mp3 website went live in late 1995 and music was available digitally, for those who knew where to look.

Perhaps the most fascinating part of this book involves Dell Glover and Tony Dockery – two workers at the PolyGram plant with a friendship and a fascination with the new digital frontier of the internet. With this new growing channel for pirated music, Glover downloaded the mp3 player and had a small library of songs on his hard drive for the first time. If the songs could be downloaded for free on the internet, he wondered what was the point of CD’s? An online encounter with a man known only as ‘Kali’ led to the two employees smuggling CD’s out of the plant and transmitting them to Kali’s server. By 2004, Glover had leaked nearly 2000 CD’s and it almost became a compulsion that the two friends were unable to stop.

This book takes us through the beginnings of ITunes and the unexpected success of the iPod, an online community of music lovers who were sharing music without paying for it, of amateur’s who loved the music and technology, to those who simply wanted to make money… By 2004 the future of the recording industry looked bleak, with CD sales down and pirate sites like ‘Oink’ four times bigger than iTunes by 2006. This is the story of greed, of risk taking, of real economic damage to the music industry and of how the power of the internet took everyone by surprise. Most of this book relates to rap music – which I personally do not like and know nothing about – but, as a journalistic story of pirated music, it is a riveting read. For anyone with any interest in the history of music, this will be a fascinating read.

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Jun 25, 2015 Maciek rated it liked it

Shelves: read-in-2015, non-fiction, 2015-releases, reviewed

I first learned about this book from an article I read back in April, titled The Man Who Broke the Music Business. The article is a selection of material which would eventually appear in the published book, and gives a good image of its style and content - if you read and enjoyed it, there is a good chance that you'll enjoy the full book as well.

Basically, How Music Got Free takes a complex and fascinating subject - the development of digital audio compression, and its subsequent impact on music ...more

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Aug 27, 2015 Hank Stuever rated it it was ok

This is another of those reviews that I would give 2.5 stars if possible, but instead of rounding up to three, I'm lowering it to two.

The story here is indeed captivating -- and tragic, although it's not presented as a tragedy. I think it's smart to come at the erosion of the record industry's business model in the Internet age from three directions (the people who invented mp3 technology; the people who helped themselves to file-sharing without a nanosecond's thought about the fact that they we This is another of those reviews that I would give 2.5 stars if possible, but instead of rounding up to three, I'm lowering it to two.

The story here is indeed captivating -- and tragic, although it's not presented as a tragedy. I think it's smart to come at the erosion of the record industry's business model in the Internet age from three directions (the people who invented mp3 technology; the people who helped themselves to file-sharing without a nanosecond's thought about the fact that they were stealing; and the stalwart record executive who was helpless to stop it). There's a strong narrative here and good reporting to back it up. I learned a lot.

But the writing, though. Only when you get to the acknowledgments does it become clear, when Stephen Witt brags that he's never been published before. It shows. You can sense of lot of grunting and straining. There are many sentences here that read straight out of someone's "Magazine Feature Writing 101" course: description for description's sake, clunky expositions, transitions, overstatement. Someone can't just have a name and a background. Instead, the author writes: "There was this hard-ass attorney general in New York by the name of Eliot Spitzer..." (p. 196); "In June 1999, an 18-year-old Northeastern University dropout by the name of Shawn Fanning ..." (p. 114). The overwritten jacket copy sort of warns you that you're going to hear the author's spurs clanking as he walks you through this tale ("in the tradition of writers like Michael Lewis and Lawrence Wright" -- um, no), but I still found it distracting and in need of one more good, tight edit. The voice was all over the place. It took me too long to read this book, which should have been a breeze.

Anyhow, back to content, instead of form: I kept waiting for a moral examination in this book that never came. The author speaks of his own vast collection of pirated music and he talks at length to the thief at the CD pressing plant who stole more music than anyone, who never has an explanation for why he had to do it. Nor does the author really talk about why he and an entire generation felt entitled to have a stolen product. This is a book about how everyone helped themselves to free music online. Everyone except those of us who didn't; those of us who, according to Witt, were over 30; we employed the same central ethic that keeps us from walking out of a 7-Eleven with candy bars we haven't paid for. Why? What changed in our philosophical/ethical core? Witt does provide some stray thoughts about how the cloud is the final end to this personal notion of "owning" a "music collection," but the book really lacks a final declarative point of view on what really happened on a moral or psychological or cultural plane.

What happened to the music industry is really no different than what's happening to everything else in medialand. I bought "How Music Got Free" at Book Soup in Los Angeles, one of my favorite independent bookstores. It took Stephen Witt five years to write it. It cost me $27.95 plus tax to buy it and read it. In a karmic sense, though, I should have stolen it or found a free copy of it online. ...more

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May 04, 2019 Maciej Nowicki rated it really liked it

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. How Music Got Free is a look at basically mp3, file-sharing, online piracy and what that did to the music industry between the mid-nineties to the mid-2000s. It is also a story of obsession, music, crime and money. It’s also a great picture of how we and our companies change. If you have ever looked at your music library on your PC or an mp3 player and asked yourself a question how all these recordings got here, here is a book which helps you to understand the whole process. Stephen Witt, the au How Music Got Free is a look at basically mp3, file-sharing, online piracy and what that did to the music industry between the mid-nineties to the mid-2000s. It is also a story of obsession, music, crime and money. It’s also a great picture of how we and our companies change. If you have ever looked at your music library on your PC or an mp3 player and asked yourself a question how all these recordings got here, here is a book which helps you to understand the whole process. Stephen Witt, the author of How Music Got Free, once stated the same question I began to investigate this. Surprisingly, he discovered that all the files that he had on his PC could be traced back to just three people.

Anyway, one of the men was named Karlheinz Brandenburg a brilliant German inventor who had spent his life investigating the properties of the human ear and how to delete frequencies that were invisible to it. He had spent decades investigating in human anatomy and what the ear could hear. So, when we hear noise what’s actually happening is it like vibrations in the air are coming and hitting our eardrum that’s transferred through something called the bony labyrinth to a small little organ inside your skull and your inner ear. It is called the cochlear which shaped like a snail’s shell. Inside the cochlear, there are these little hairs that vibrate and if you get enough for them vibrating they transfer a neuron in the brain.

Karlheinz Brandenburg during his studies, suddenly, came up with something that we now call the mp3 encoder which had the ability to take the information on a compact disc and shrink it by about 90% with very little loss in audio quality and, eventually, became the major medium for online piracy . Unfortunately, he was totally unable to monetise this invention and in desperation in 1995 he posted it for free public download to his website. Within a couple years the Pirates got a hold of it and he ended up making hundreds of millions of dollars from intellectual property.

The second person was Doug Morris, a powerful music executive at Warner Music Group in the mid-90s. He started to realise that the future of pop music was really bad so he started working with big names, major rappers such as Tupac Shakur, Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg. It seems that their audience has found the concept of online piracy resonating and boosted the market.

The third person, Dell Glover, was the most fascinating one and the core story of this book. He was a compact disc manufacturing facility worker at the Kings Mountain CD pressing plant in North Carolina. As he worked at the packaging line and all of this music was literally at his fingertips he figured out how to sneak out all unpublished discs. He contacted similar leakers and joined online pirate groups. There are some estimations that throughout his activity, over the course of seven years, he might smuggle approximately 2,000 discs out of the plant and ripped them to mp3.

Within hours this music would be found in peer-to-peer servers like Kazaa, Napster or LimeWire torrents. Anyway, Dell’s pirate group, Rabid Neurosis (RNS), become the premier music piracy group in the world and they by recruiting music journalists, radio DJs and people who worked in music stores, but Dell was their key inside man. For example, he leaked Nickelback, The Eminem Show, Jay-z, Kanye West, U2 and many others.

Because the music industry was losing tons of money they did an analysis which showed that the only way to stop piracy is to make it costly and expensive by throwing the pirates in jail and that is the approach that they took. So next part of the book discusses a campaign that was launched by the record companies to crack down... (if you like to read my full review please visit my blog https://leadersarereaders.blog/how-mu...) ...more

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Feb 22, 2016 thefourthvine rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, business

Lately, I've been having the novel experience of reading about history I remember. I remember the events of this book -- I remember my own perspective, as a very minor I-hate-the-music-industry downloader, of basically everything that happens in this book after the invention of the mp3. This is a fascinating parallax view of history, and I absolutely recommend this for anyone who remembers the heyday of music piracy.

I recommend it for people who don't remember that, too, if they're interested i Lately, I've been having the novel experience of reading about history I remember. I remember the events of this book -- I remember my own perspective, as a very minor I-hate-the-music-industry downloader, of basically everything that happens in this book after the invention of the mp3. This is a fascinating parallax view of history, and I absolutely recommend this for anyone who remembers the heyday of music piracy.

I recommend it for people who don't remember that, too, if they're interested in either how we ended up with the music industry the way it is, or massive, total failures to adapt. This book covers both those topics in ample, fascinating detail, and I learned a lot of things I had absolutely no clue about at when they were happening. A small sample of the things I learned from this book:

1. The NHL was at the forefront of the mp3 revolution. Without hockey, we might not be using mp3s today.

2. I should not have disliked Hilary Rosen as much as I did in 2000; she was the dove arguing behind the scenes for making peace with electronic music and pirates.

3. Most pirated music files can be traced back to one of a limited number of groups of rippers; my image of the early days of piracy, which was random people uploading their music collections and downloading other people's, was almost totally incorrect.

4. Metallica's "Until It Sleeps" was the first "officially" pirated song, which seems especially just considering their hysterical opposition to piracy years later.

The book is also -- well, somewhat quirky. Normally non-fiction lives or dies on its narrative voice, and to be honest, Witt doesn't have much of one. Instead, he has weird moments of personal bias. These can be funny, like his truly massive hateboner for Linkin Park, which was so extreme that in reaction I found myself nostalgically wanting to listen to them for the first time since I lived down the street from -- this is true -- a Linkin Park cover garage band made up of teenagers who were just learning to play their instruments. (Three years of that, and yet I hate Linkin Park less than Witt.) But his bias is also unfortunately visible when it comes to describing the life of Dell Glover, the main CD leaker -- like, Witt at one point says Glover, who is black, was born after the era of discrimination. He is, uh, definitely wrong about that, since babies born tomorrow will still be born in the era of discrimination. In general, Witt has a very easy time relating to people who are pretty much like him, and flounders a lot when he's asked to empathize with or understand people who aren't. And his style is clear but not exactly exciting.

However, the story he's telling -- that is exciting. It's interesting watching an entire industry engage in what might best be termed malignant denial. It's interesting learning who got rich off the piracy era and who didn't. It's interesting finding out what happens when pirates grow up.

Basically, it's interesting to learn more about how music got free. ...more

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Aug 13, 2015 Amy rated it it was amazing

As a middle school teacher I often find myself obsessing about the era when I was a middle schooler. To live this horror and nostalgia over and over again, I often seek out nonfiction that covers the years 1999-2002/3 ish. I demolished this book in two days, and I would have finished it sooner had I not stopped to coo at my new nephew for a few hours.

The digital music revolution is the story of my middle school years ... my friends and I quickly went from mix tapes to Napster, we were pretty sur ...more

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Sep 26, 2018 Kara Babcock rated it really liked it

Shelves: culture, history, own, economics, non-fiction, 2018-read

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy was published in 2015, and I was a little worried that being three years old would already render it obsolete. Fortunately, I was wrong. Stephen Witt’s explanation of the rise of mp3 and the transition from CDs to digital stores to streaming, along with the corresponding piracy, is clear and detailed and incredibly fascinating. This is the type of non-fiction I like: full of facts and figures, but How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy was published in 2015, and I was a little worried that being three years old would already render it obsolete. Fortunately, I was wrong. Stephen Witt’s explanation of the rise of mp3 and the transition from CDs to digital stores to streaming, along with the corresponding piracy, is clear and detailed and incredibly fascinating. This is the type of non-fiction I like: full of facts and figures, but organized in such a way that it tells a compelling story while you’re reading.

Witt starts off in the late eighties and early nineties. He essentially tells two parallel tales: Karlheinz Brandenburg’s team at Fraunhofer invents and perfects the mp3, while Dell Glover works at a CD printing plant in North Carolina, where he becomes the leading source of pirated music. Along the way, we also spend time with Doug Morris, a prominent record executive, and various pirate groups and the law enforcement officers trying to shut them down. That might sound scattered, but Witt manages to bring everything together into a coherent and unified look a the the past thirty years of the music industry.

I’m a little younger than Witt. His introduction places him in college in 1997, cramming a 2 GB hard drive full of pirated tunes. I turned 8 in 1997, and I wasn’t much into music at that point. In fact, I was a very late bloomer when it came to forming personal musical tastes and beginning to collect my own music—I think I was well into high school, by which time the iTunes Store was well established. Although I did buy or receive many CDs (mostly movie soundtracks and classical stuff) around that age, my first real experience with collecting music was already digital. I never much got into pirating—I missed that golden age, coming in just after Napster when everything had fragmented and you had to try your luck with torrents and Kazaa or Limewire. I had no trouble getting iTunes Store gift cards for my birthday or Christmas and spending those on $0.99 tracks and $9.99 albums; I chafed at the DRM, for sure, and celebrated when Apple did away with it. Since then, I’ve moved on to another storefront, 7digital, mostly because I try to avoid using iTunes itself these days. I haven’t subscribed to any streaming services—I like to own my music, even if it does exist as lossy bits on a hard drive.

I love how Witt balances the social history with a technical explanation of the workings of the mp3 format. As a mathematician, I’m fascinated by the information-theoretical underpinnings of the mp3. Witt goes into a lot of detail regarding the experiments that Brandenburg’s team did to tailor the mp3’s compression algorithm to best store the components of audio that human ears can detect. In particular, we learn a lot about the struggle to capture in the best fidelity the “lone speaker”. Alongside this technical overview comes the chronicle of the mp3 repeatedly facing rejection from MPEG as a new standard. I never knew that it basically lost out to mp2 as the format of choice—at least until some fateful twists and turns made it into the number one format for streaming pirated music, and then … well, the rest is history and the mp3 is here to stay.

By the same token, Witt provides more detail about the history of music piracy than I ever knew. Obviously early pirated music had to come from CDs, but I didn’t know they were being smuggled so brazenly out of the manufacturing plants. And I didn’t know the nature of the underground community, the way there were l33t groups who took pride in orchestrating and coordinating a release of a pirated album ahead of its actual release date. I really enjoy learning about these kinds of subcultures that existed in the earlier eras of the Internet but have now morphed or disappeared. The Internet has moved so fast in the past ten years that it’s easy, especially for us young’uns, to forget there have been entire movements that sprang up and died off prior to that time.

I also like how we have a very nuanced portrait of the music industry. It’s easy, in my opinion, to be sympathetic to pirates and artists both, and to have a bit of a one-dimensional view of the music executives. Yet Witt emphasizes how, for better or worse, there was a symbiotic ecosystem happening among artists, executives, and consumers. And as the technology changed, of course the industry changed—but why it changed the way it did is so incredibly fascinating.

And then there’s Dell Glover. He grows and matures over the decade he pirates music. He starts as a risk-taking, cool car–driving bootlegger and turns into a more responsible father who decides he no longer wants the heat associated with pirating. It’s interesting to see Witt recount the details of Glover’s involvement in what was quite literally this international operation to leak new releases.

There are a few aspects of How Music Got Free I didn’t like, mostly to do with Witt’s writing. At times, some of the analogies he uses felt dated or awkward or just in bad taste, like when he compares something to an alcoholic who can’t avoid the bottle or something along those lines (it has been over a week since I finished the book, so my memory has already blurred). I just remember thinking, “Um, that wasn’t necessary, where is your editor, young man?” At other points, Witt either introduces or fails to introduce concepts, technologies, parts of history, etc., that don’t need or definitely need, respectively, that introduction. Just some odd editing choices overall.

None of that dampens my enthusiasm for this book, though. It’s a lovely little history of a particular part of the music industry, the era that was the jump from physical to digital media, and some of the internecine conflicts among artists and executives and fans and audience alike. How Music Got Free lives up to the expectations set by its bombastic title, and I learned a great deal from this relatively short non-fiction read!

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Sep 28, 2015 J. rated it really liked it

Shelves: music, sound-audio, inside-track

Fascinating read for anyone who’s been a music enthusiast for any time at all, or spent more than a few bucks at Tower or Virgin over the years. Stephen Witt’s book attempts to mesh the inside-the-biz story with the developments afforded by an evolving technological curve-- and how the human factor contributes or throws it all off.
First up is how music got ABBREVIATED.

Researchers around the world, emboldened with the understanding that now that a full, luxurious musical waveform could be quanti ...more

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Aug 25, 2015 Karl Geiger rated it really liked it

Shelves: technology, politics, business

“Do you realize what you’ve done? You’ve killed the music industry.”

Witt's investigative journalism reports how technology and society shifted beneath the music industry's feet, a trend continuing today as Big Music's hunt for revenue moves to streaming and live performances.

The 30-year tale interleaves music moguls and companies (Doug Morris, Jimmy Iovine, Universal, others), the most popular and profitable acts of the last 20 years (Dr. Dre, Ice Tea, Lil Wayne, Kanye West, and many, many othe “Do you realize what you’ve done? You’ve killed the music industry.”

Witt's investigative journalism reports how technology and society shifted beneath the music industry's feet, a trend continuing today as Big Music's hunt for revenue moves to streaming and live performances.

The 30-year tale interleaves music moguls and companies (Doug Morris, Jimmy Iovine, Universal, others), the most popular and profitable acts of the last 20 years (Dr. Dre, Ice Tea, Lil Wayne, Kanye West, and many, many others), the technologists (Karlheinz Brandenburg, Bernhard Grill, Harald Popp, et al) at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute who spent a decade perfecting a "good enough" psychoacoustic music compression format (MP3), and the file-sharing underground ("The Scene", "Oink's Pink Palace", others). The whirlwind sucks in tech giants and midgets such as Steve Jobs/Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Philips, Shawn Fanning/Napster as well as the FBI, the German government, the RIAA, and even the NHL.

In the beginning, it wasn't clear whether Fraunhofer's MP3 would succeed as a technology at all. MP3 won the late 1990s "MPEG format wars" in part by relying on the ripper/file sharing underground, and the underground in turn relied heavily on one person, Benny Glover, a key employee at a Polygram/Universal's North Carolina CD pressing plant. Glover smuggled music discs weeks before commercial release -- a point of pride was to release the MP3 tracks weeks before the CD hit store shelves. Smugglers fed rippers, rippers fed communities, communities made markets, and iPods took those markets' revenue from Big Music.

This book's cautionary tale applies directly to those in entertainment and entertainment technology: music, film/television, gaming, publishing. The music industry's strategic blindness, collusion, and adversarial relationships with their customers and their governments helped destroy billions in value: when Big Music insisted RIAA head Hilary Rosen persecute consumers, she refused and resigned. Clearly, the moguls would not and could not get the message.

Similar Schumpeterian "creative destruction" is eating alive Hollywood's and the cable television companies' business models in 2015. Those in the business of supplying a fancy bitstream to consumers at a rent need to be looking over their shoulders and thinking harder about how to satisfy that demand in a world glutted with art and technology, where downward pressure on the entertainment dollar is constant, and where many would rather just Facebook, YouTube, or Vevo for free than watch pay TV or buy music and books.

Last: never, ever underestimate the power of the disaffected computer-savvy, especially those with fast Internet connections, multi-terabyte storage systems, and more time on their hands than money in their pockets. ...more

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May 16, 2015 Steven rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: own

A fascinating exploration into how the way we consume music was revolutionised by the age of the internet. While skillfully avoiding patronising his readers, Witt guides us through the origins of the mp3, the early internet piracy warez scene, the introduction of peer-to-peer technology, and the ups and downs of both the Record Industry and the lives of those responsible for stealing, ripping, uploading, and sharing its products for free. As a member of "Generation Pirate", it was almost like an ...more

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May 07, 2015 Andrew McMillen rated it it was amazing

'How Music Got Free' is a must-read for any music fan. Stephen Witt’s book is an exhaustive and engaging history of how an innocuous computer audio file type named mp3 irrevocably changed the global recording industry.

The American author opens provocatively: “I am a member of the pirate generation.” On arriving at college in 1997, he hadn’t heard of a single mp3; by graduation, he owned six 20-gigabyte hard drives full of digital singles, EPs and albums, none of which he had paid for.

“The files ...more

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Jun 26, 2020 Lori rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This book read like a novel. Extremely well put-together and absolutely fascinating. A lot of the techy stuff went over my head, but that was expected. Reading about how they made the mp3 small enough to actually download was nuts, definitely one of my favorite parts of the book.

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Aug 07, 2015 Joe M rated it it was amazing

Shelves: music-lovers, audiobooks, read-in-2015, nonfiction

A fascinating story and highly recommended for anyone who loves music, technology, or has loaded their iPod up with their favorite songs and albums through iTunes, Napster, or other, more questionable sources the last 15 years. For a first-time author, Stephen Witt is an exceptional storyteller and he thrillingly alternates between multiple narratives, moving chronologically from the early MPEG format wars, the emergence of underground Scene Topsites, to the widespread use of BitTorrent as a mea A fascinating story and highly recommended for anyone who loves music, technology, or has loaded their iPod up with their favorite songs and albums through iTunes, Napster, or other, more questionable sources the last 15 years. For a first-time author, Stephen Witt is an exceptional storyteller and he thrillingly alternates between multiple narratives, moving chronologically from the early MPEG format wars, the emergence of underground Scene Topsites, to the widespread use of BitTorrent as a means to acquire a massive (and morally ambiguous) digital music library.

The background on Doug Morris and Universal Music is especially interesting, and an added bonus is Witt's mico-history of Death Row and Cash Money Records, and the role 90-2000's-era hip-hop played fueling leaks and the pre-release frenzy. No technology story is complete without Steve Jobs stirring the pot, and it was fascinating to see the evolution of the iPod coupled with Jobs's race to introduce iTunes as a means to counteract piracy and "cleanse the world of the sin."

While Shawn Fanning and the development of Napster is certainly a huge milestone and duly covered here, in many ways that story has been exhausted, so it was great to see at least three full chapters dedicated instead to Alan Ellis and the rise and fall of the once mighty Oink's Pink Palace. Ellis and the OPP community were game changers in the way that music was ripped, distributed, and archived, and Witt provides a captivating character study, finally bringing a little known, but crucial story into the light.

If there is a 'scene-stealer' in this book(sorry, couldn't resist!) without a doubt it's Dell Glover, a savvy disk-manufacturing plant employee, who rose through the ranks of the scene group "RNS" in the mid-2000's and leaked literally thousands of the biggest releases of the last decade, essentially revolutionizing the way music is distributed, and dismantling the old order and business model of the music industry. Taken as a whole, the stories of How Music Got Free are absolutely mind-boggling and a must-read for music fans. ...more

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Mar 01, 2016 AlcoholBooksCinema rated it liked it

Shelves: non-fiction

Unless the book demands a lot of concentration, I prefer reading a book while listening to music. That has always been the scenario because when I was a kid, grandmother kept the radio on, all day along, sometimes even at night(she still does that, thanks to the earplugs). I got used to being attentive to the radio so much I would not study unless the radio crackled in the background. Since this book deals with music, I read it while listening to music.

Make no mistake: Don't judge the book beca ...more

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Jan 29, 2017 Paras Kapadia rated it it was amazing

When I grew up, I was a part of this. I remember the 1st time I installed Winamp and played a .mp3 song on my computer. When Limewire and Kazaa were all we spoke about and then we started seeing bootlegged CDs and DVDs peddled on the streets of CST. The way we consumed music changed throughout our childhood.

To learn about the people who brought about this revolution of sorts was absolutely fascinating. My favorite is how .mp3 went mainstream. In fact, I'm surprised these stories haven't received ...more

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Mar 17, 2018 Avery rated it it was amazing

Now this is how you write a damn book!! Within the first three chapters, I have thrilled in the unexpected drama of a team of unfunny German engineers writing an algorithm, started to put puzzle pieces together about how piracy began, and been convinced to care about the feelings of a wealthy record company executive who signed Snoop Dogg. I am in awe of the author's writing abilities.

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Jul 21, 2015 Leftbanker rated it it was amazing

This was a very entertaining history of the digital revolution and the birth of internet piracy. I lived through all of this and am still waiting for the end of the story. While I wait I have a few questions for everyone.

I think that the first bit of music I paid for was an 8 track cassette (the preferred format among white trash). Then I stepped backward into vinyl for a few years with the occasional cassette tape. Then came Compact Discs, a format that I always thought was stupid even though I ...more

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Jul 18, 2015 John rated it it was amazing

What a good book for anyone who went through the evolution of music on LP, cassette and CD to the mp3 format, and through the evolution of the Internet. There is no way I could have predicted for myself that at some point I would never be buying music on a CD again and that I would get all my music from the Internet with a music service.

This was a fascinating book all the way through. For those of us who didn’t know the details of how the mp3 format and many others came about, it was great. The ...more

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Jan 09, 2017 Mark rated it it was ok

Reads like a Wired article blown out to book length. There's one really interesting story in here, about an employee at a Carolina CD pressing plant who smuggles out thousands of hit albums to advance his side hustle selling bootleg DVD's. The rest of the story told here is rather incomplete, and inconclusive. Witt doesn't have much insight into either the German inventors who created the mp3 format or the Universal executive who continued making lots of money steering a sinking ship. But the bi ...more

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Nov 07, 2015 Byron rated it it was amazing

A better book than John Seabrook's the Song Machine, or whatever it's called, which i also recently read, this tells the story of how Internets piracy fucked the music industry in much greater detail than anything else I've ever read. It starts with the invention of the mp3, beginning way back in the mid '80s (surprisingly, they already had the idea for Spotify back then), and continues up through the explosion of piracy on college campuses in the late '90s (as KRS-One would say, I was there), a ...more

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Nov 29, 2017 Lee G rated it it was amazing

This book really blew my mind. The fact that regular people with dedication and passion (the technology innovators and online pirate community) totally changed the world and crippled an entire industry. It also raised really interesting questions about the future of intellectual property and copyright law in the wake of an entire generation that decided those laws were not worth keeping when it came to downloading music illegally. This is about a seismic shift in our society and it reads like a ...more

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Aug 16, 2016 Owen rated it it was amazing

Fantastic book about the history of the MP3 – I was enthralled by this story and enjoyed it very much, a lot of things I had no idea about, particularly the amount of engineering that goes into an audio storage format. Amazing.

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Apr 08, 2019 Kara Miller rated it did not like it

If you like music you’d probably like it. If you’re required to read it for a class you hate; you’ll hate it.

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May 17, 2017 Pat rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: music, non-fiction, owned-books

How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt chronicles the fall of the traditional model of the music industry in the digital age. The book's title is deliberately ambiguous as it suggests that music lost its value over the last few decades, but also broke free of the shackles of the record companies as music fans could now access any music they wanted at the touch of a button & for no monetary outlay. The book's subtitle ("What happens when an entire generation commits the same crime?") is also ambiguou How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt chronicles the fall of the traditional model of the music industry in the digital age. The book's title is deliberately ambiguous as it suggests that music lost its value over the last few decades, but also broke free of the shackles of the record companies as music fans could now access any music they wanted at the touch of a button & for no monetary outlay. The book's subtitle ("What happens when an entire generation commits the same crime?") is also ambiguous as it highlights the criminal aspect of illegal music downloading while also suggesting it's okay because everybody's doing it.

Unlike most authors of books about the music industry, Witt is not a music journalist. He is, in fact, a music fan & a member of the generation brought up on pirating music from the internet, one who admits that he filled hard drives with hundreds of thousands of illegally downloaded music files. Witt also has degrees in mathematics and, later, journalism. As a result, How Music Got Free is a well-researched & well-told account of the rise of digital media & the decline of the record industry that tells the story from three equally interesting sides.

One strand focuses on the development of mp3 technology in Germany & Witt makes this strand interesting by showing how the mp3 eventually succeeded amidst completion from other methods of compressing sound files. As he does throughout, Witt focuses on the important players in each section & tells the story through their failures & successes.

Witt also looks at early digital music piracy by telling the story of a couple of employees at the North Carolina packaging plant of the PolyGram record company. Though polar opposites of the mp3 developers in Germany, the American duo show an equal ability to merge their interest in & knowledge of computers & the Internet with an eye for business to build a profitable business bootlegging DVDs & CDs to sell on the black market in their locality. Witt then traces how these guys were just one of the many technologically self-taught music fans whose work would eventually lead to sites like Napster & The Pirate Bay.

The third strand of Witt's look at the music industry focuses on the record companies, particularity through the eyes of one of its most powerful figures, Doug Morris, who presided over a number of the world's biggest record companies prior to the digital era. As he had with the mp3 developers & the digital pirates, Witt tells Morris' story with a lot of respect for his achievements & he makes the reader identify with him. Nevertheless, Witt is more critical of Morris than the others, particularly his lack of willingness to embrace the Internet & mp3 technology. Witt's disdain for Morris & his favouring of the scientists & the music pirates is probably not surprising given the author's own history as a digital music pirate, though it also presents a more biased argument that is more critical of the record industry than the music pirates.

How Music Got Free is an informed & entertaining account of how the music industry moved from being a successful business that created wealthy rock stars by selling physical product to music fans into a failing industry that failed to adapt to the arrival of the internet & the mp3. And, like the perception of digital music, his account comes across as cold & unemotional, lacking the empathy of the music fan who prefers vinyl over mp3 files. ...more

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Mar 06, 2018 Anshul Soni added it

I am going to keep the review quite simple without much spoilers for the reader but would still talk about the general outline.
I did like the book very much and it was on a subject which has impacted everyone in a big way.
There are parallel stories involving the struggles of inventor of MP3 format, the music industry executive who has a good business acumen but seems overpaid and a common man leaking music out of a compact disc plant. Now I agree that these three factors play their roles in sep I am going to keep the review quite simple without much spoilers for the reader but would still talk about the general outline.
I did like the book very much and it was on a subject which has impacted everyone in a big way.
There are parallel stories involving the struggles of inventor of MP3 format, the music industry executive who has a good business acumen but seems overpaid and a common man leaking music out of a compact disc plant. Now I agree that these three factors play their roles in separate ways which are interlinked in a big scale I still feel that the weightage given to each stories could have been different. In an imperfect analogy, the title somehow makes people curious about to know more about the Robin Hoods of this story rather than about the King whom they were against at.

The piece about music labels can be explored in details without having a characters point of view as the reader understands his motive quite early as the revenue generator rather than looking at a long term or future of the industry. The story of new rappers dishing out hits was rather interesting but as one progresses, it is clear that inventor and music leaker deserves centerstage more. Infact torrent technology and the resulting supersite were equally interesting sections. The fraunhoffer institute story shows that there should always be a team which can understand the far reaching consequence of a research- (similar thing as the case where xerox missed the power of GUI and lost out to apple.) An addendum can be added in the book over coming years about how STREAMING services killed the piracy (almost) but looking at how spotify and soundcloud are struggling against apple music that should be another book which the author might hopefully pursue after years.

In short- Music got free because once the individual music files could be converted/digitized in a simple way and the delivery mechanism kept evolving (download/bootlegged cd/torrent).

There is a plenty of research in the book which is commendable. Directly getting the info from the horse's mouth is no small feat (read the book to know who is the horse!). Kudos to the author to get so deep and make efforts.
The end could not have been more solid, totally loved it. ...more

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May 28, 2018 Yaseen Jabbar rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Part historical novel, part epic, and part textbook, How Music Got Free is a look back at how the very concept of bootleg mp3s came about. In my teen years, I must have torrented over 200 gigs of music, all the way up until a few years ago when I switched to Spotify Premium. The book is a fascinating read, dispelling the premise that illegal mp3s are the work of many players: in fact, if it wasn't for the work of one man, almost all of modern music wouldn't be 'free'. The book starts in the 1980 ...more

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Sep 08, 2020 Luis rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This is one of the best businessy books I've ever read. Mostly because I lived through this piece of history!

As a 12 year old living in Northern Mexico with a Pentium 4 and a 56kbps dial-up connection, having access to the internet was a window to the outside world and one of the most important factors on making me who I am.

I was familiar with the Metallica vs Napster lawsuit, Shawn Fanning / Sean Parker and the whole history of torrentz and The Pirate Bay. But I didn't know about the individual ...more

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Sep 02, 2018 Rahul Jain rated it really liked it

I could, in a sense, boil it down to a scientist's (as well as the artist's) inability to understand the businessmen (the music industry) and vice-versa, leading to upheaval of the entire music industry, and pretty much how we currently interact with the internet.

Maybe it all was inevitable, and maybe Brandenberg and Morris are just mediums to materialise the progress of the universe - if not them, but somebody else; but the story works as a fable - a clash of egos (even if rightly placed) and a ...more

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Feb 07, 2020 Peter rated it really liked it

It's a pretty amazing conceit: if you bought or stole music (i.e., stole mp3s) anywhere between 1996 and 2005-- which I definitely did both-- some if not all of that music passed under the eyes of a rural North Carolina factory worker named Dell Glover. And it's a testament to Witt's storytelling ability to weave Glover's tale within the seismic changes of the digital economy, technological limits and ultimate demise of the record industry. So while I was way into this, having had a seat in this ...more

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