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

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

    • 5.0 • 3 Ratings
    • $14.99

    • $14.99

Publisher Description

"What happens when an entire generation commits the same crime?"

How Music Got Free is a riveting story of obsession, music, crime, and money, featuring visionaries and criminals, moguls and tech-savvy teenagers. It’s about the greatest pirate in history, the most powerful executive in the music business, a revolutionary invention and an illegal website four times the size of the iTunes Music Store.

Journalist Stephen Witt traces the secret history of digital music piracy, from the German audio engineers who invented the mp3, to a North Carolina compact-disc manufacturing plant where factory worker Dell Glover leaked nearly two thousand albums over the course of a decade, to the high-rises of midtown Manhattan where music executive Doug Morris cornered the global market on rap, and, finally, into the darkest recesses of the Internet.

Through these interwoven narratives, Witt has written a thrilling book that depicts the moment in history when ordinary life became forever entwined with the world online — when, suddenly, all the music ever recorded was available for free. In the page-turning tradition of writers like Michael Lewis and Lawrence Wright, Witt’s deeply-reported first book introduces the unforgettable characters—inventors, executives, factory workers, and smugglers—who revolutionized an entire artform, and reveals for the first time the secret underworld of media pirates that transformed our digital lives.

An irresistible never-before-told story of greed, cunning, genius, and deceit, How Music Got Free isn’t just a story of the music industry—it’s a must-read history of the Internet itself.

GENRE
Business & Personal Finance
NARRATOR
SW
Stephen Witt
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
09:13
hr min
RELEASED
2015
June 16
PUBLISHER
Penguin Audio
SIZE
445.4
MB

Customer Reviews

rogeriyengar.com ,

Fantastic

This book is fascinating and it is well read on the recording. The book includes an accessible but accurate description of the technological innovations that enabled online music piracy. It also paints complete portraits of the people involved; both on the technical side and in the music industry.

Listeners Also Bought

Dave Barry Does Japan (Unabridged) Dave Barry Does Japan (Unabridged)
1999
Powerhouse Powerhouse
2016
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (Unabridged) The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (Unabridged)
2011
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Unabridged) Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Unabridged)
2016
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't (Unabridged) The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't (Unabridged)
2012
All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World (Unabridged) All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World (Unabridged)
2024