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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)

4.22 · Rating details · 3,831 Ratings · 471 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.
...more

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Jun 25, 2015 Maciek rated it liked it

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

...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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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 28, 2015 J. rated it really liked it

Shelves: inside-track, music, sound-audio

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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Mar 21, 2018 ΠανωςΚ rated it it was amazing

Συναρπαστικό. Ίσως κάπως εξειδικευμένο. Θέλω να πω, μπορεί και να μη σε ενδιαφέρει η ιστορία του mp3, της μουσικής πειρατείας και της μουσικής βιομηχανίας των τελευταίων 20+ ετών. Εμένα όμως πάντα με ενδιέφερε, και το βιβλίο αυτό μου έλυσε πολλές απορίες, η κυριότερη των οποίων ήταν η εξής: ποιοι διάολο είναι αυτοί οι άνθρωποι που πρωτοδιαρρέουν έναν δίσκο στο διαδίκτυο για κατέβασμα και πώς το διάολο το καταφέρνουν πριν καν ο δίσκος φτάσει στα δισκάδικα;

(εναλλακτικά, αντί του βιβλίου, μπορείς ...more

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Aug 25, 2015 Karl Geiger rated it really liked it

Shelves: business, politics, technology

“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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Jan 23, 2016 Volodymyr Dehtyarov rated it really liked it

Отличная, отличная книга. Рекомендую всем, кто имеет дело с созданием контента, его распространением, управлением творческим коллективом.
Автор рассказывает историю создания цифровых аудио и видео-форматов и "войну форматов", зарождение и развитие пиратского движения, развитие музыкальной индустрии, борьбу с пиратством и попытки угнаться за технологиями. И рассказывает все это через жизненные линии нескольких персонажей, которые переплетаются и влияют друг на друга: ученый-изобретатель формата m ...more

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Aug 07, 2015 Joe M rated it it was amazing

Shelves: audiobooks, music-lovers, read-in-2015, non-fiction

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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Oct 15, 2017 Kate Tolokolnikova rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Це крутезно написаний нон-фікшн, який читається як художка. Ще коли український переклад книжки Стівена Вітта тільки анонсувався, мені подумалось, що тематика така вузька...Як журналістці, мені здалося, що це тема радше для статті-лонгріду: як помер формат CD-диска, виник mp3 і розквітло музичне піратство, яке враз змінило закони музичної індустрії. Книжка саме про це, але автор розповідає про цей процес в таких деталях, і настільки захопливо, що аж важко повірити, що так можна. Виявляється, мож ...more

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May 01, 2018 Michael Bohli rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2018, non-fiction, music

Die Musikbranche hat sich mit der digitalen Evolution für immer verändert – zum Guten, wie auch zum Schlechten. Doch wie konnte es passieren, dass all diese Alben plötzlich als raubkopierte Mp3-Dateien im Netz vorzufinden waren? Dieser Frage geht Stephen Richard Witt in "How Music Got Free" auf unterhaltsame Weise nach. Nicht nur werden die technischen Hintergründe und Entwicklungen beleuchtet, auch die Machenschaften der Labels und der verantwortlichen "Einzelkriminellen" erhalten ihre Bühne.

S ...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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Jun 09, 2018 Ann Sokolova rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Очень познавательная книга о том, кто и как создал mp3, как он потом начал жить своей жизнью и как изменил музыкальную индустрию. Забавно, что некоторые из описанных старых технологий я застала в студенчестве, как и музыкальное пиратство в КПИ-шной сетке :D Написана плоховато, редакторская работа и работа с персонажами не очень. Плотность повествования хорошая. А вообще, конечно, огромный респект автору, невероятный труд про музыку! Читать всем, кто слушает музыку!

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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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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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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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Oct 21, 2016 Matteo Fumagalli rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: saggistica-musica, einaudi, saggistica-comunicazione-e-media

La cronaca della nascita dell'mp3 raccontata come se fosse un thriller avvincente.
Affascinante.

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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 ambi 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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Apr 14, 2017 Conny rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

Viele von uns erinnern sich noch an die Zeit, als der Kauf eines Albums gut durchdacht und das Geld mühsam zusammengespart werden musste. Doch was genau führte dazu, dass wir heute ohne zu überlegen, mit nur ein paar Mausklicks und ohne Bezahlung an neue Musik kommen?

„How Music Got Free“ fokussiert grösstenteils auf drei Schlüsselpersonen: Ingenieur Karlheinz Brandenburg, den Vater des MP3-Formats; Doug Morris, im Laufe seiner Karriere CEO bei allen grossen Musiklabels; und Dell Glover, Mitarbei Viele von uns erinnern sich noch an die Zeit, als der Kauf eines Albums gut durchdacht und das Geld mühsam zusammengespart werden musste. Doch was genau führte dazu, dass wir heute ohne zu überlegen, mit nur ein paar Mausklicks und ohne Bezahlung an neue Musik kommen?

„How Music Got Free“ fokussiert grösstenteils auf drei Schlüsselpersonen: Ingenieur Karlheinz Brandenburg, den Vater des MP3-Formats; Doug Morris, im Laufe seiner Karriere CEO bei allen grossen Musiklabels; und Dell Glover, Mitarbeiter eines CD-Presswerks.

Am aufschlussreichsten ist die Geschichte um Karlheinz Brandenburg und sein Team. Die Forscher bewegten sich im Gebiet der sogenannten Psychoakustik – sie nutzt Unzulänglichkeiten des menschlichen Gehörs aus, um Information zu komprimieren. Und dafür hörte Brandenburg auch hunderte Male „Tom’s Diner“ von Suzanne Vega durch.

Etwa zur gleichen Zeit stieg Doug Morris in die obersten Ränge der grossen Musiklabels auf. Er hatte ein ausserordentliches Gespür für junge Talente, die sich gut verkaufen würden. In der CD-Ära bedeutete das gut und gerne ein Jahressalär von 10 Millionen – und darum ignorierte er auch das Geschehen rund um das neue MP3-Format.

Und schliesslich war da Dell Glover. Als Arbeiter in einem CD-Presswerk war es ihm möglich, tausende von Alben vor ihrer Veröffentlichung hinauszuschmuggeln. Und so führte eins zum anderen – aus kleinen Websites mit 20 Songs zum Download wurden ganze Archive, Filesharing-Software verbreitete sich und niemand wusste, wen man verklagen konnte.

„How Music Got Free“ ist ein gut recherchiertes Buch mit sorgfältig zusammengetragenen Hintergrundinformationen. Auch humorvolle Seitenhiebe gegen Künstler und Anwälte fehlen nicht. Und in jedem Fall regt es zum Nachdenken an – war die Bereicherung der Plattenfirmen gerechtfertigt? Wäre die Piraterie uninteressant gewesen, wenn sie selbst Downloadsoftware in Verbindung mit MP3-Playern entwickelt hätten? Oder war schlussendlich alles die logische Folge menschlicher Gier? ...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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Jun 09, 2018 Olia added it · review of another edition

Shelves: n_biography, n_non-fiction

Ця книжка написана майстерним журналістом у стилі жовтої преси.

Тут є:
+ історія розробки алгоритму mp3
+ проблеми і корпоративні ігри у стандартизації алгоритмів кодування
+ особливості шоу-бізнесу музичної індустрії
+ продюсинг американського репу
+ виникнення цифрового піратства

і, можливо, ще щось, але я не дочитала, бо стало нецікаво.

Автор вибрав дуже малий масштаб: історія індустрії показується на прикладі декількох людей. Описується їхня робота, зовнішність та емоційні звички, і в результаті з ...more

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Aug 10, 2018 Vados Elmee rated it it was amazing

Shelves: historical

За неймовірним збігом, гортаючи списки новинок, що варто прочитати, ця книга стала першою електронною книгою, що я придбав (до цього то були переважно паперові варіанти, а не то, що ви подумали :D ).
І це дійсно чудовий блокбастер, що читається на одному диханні (за одну 10-годинну поїздку в автобусі).
Цікаво нарешті зненацька дізнатися приголомшливі факти за кулісами світу, в якому живеш - в даному випадку інтернет світ. Адже підлітком скачуючи музику з сотень джерел я навіть не задумувався, а ...more

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Apr 16, 2018 Adam C Lewis rated it it was amazing

A book on the evolution of music tech shouldn’t be this fun. I blitzed through it and loved it.

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“Do you realize what you’ve done?” Adar asked Brandenburg after their first meeting. “You’ve killed the music industry!” — 3 likes

“In June 1999, an 18-year-old Northeastern University dropout by the name of Shawn Fanning debuted a new piece of software he had developed called Napster.” — 3 likes

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