How Music Got Free: The incredible true story of the modern music revolution, now a major new documentary series
Jun 2015 · Random House
4.8star
19 reviewsreport
Ebook
320
Pages
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About this ebook
Meet Dell Glover – the accidental pirate
Meet ‘Kali’ – the mastermind
And meet Karlheinz – the man who made it all possible
How Music Got Free is a blistering story of obsession, music and obscene money. A story of visionaries, criminals and tycoons. It’s about the greatest pirate in history, the most powerful exec in the music business, and an illegal website six times the size of iTunes.
It begins with a small-time thief at a CD-pressing plant, and a groundbreaking invention on the other side of the globe. Then pans from the multi-million-dollar deals of the music industry to the darkest corners of the web; from German audio laboratories to a tiny Polynesian radio station.
This is also the story of the music industry – the rise of rap, the death of the album, and how much can rest on the flip of a coin. How the fate of artists like Kanye West, Jay-Z and 50 Cent were being controlled by a guy no one had ever heard of. How suddenly all the tracks ever recorded could be accessed by anyone, for free. And the industry imploded.
Meet ‘Kali’ – the mastermind
And meet Karlheinz – the man who made it all possible
How Music Got Free is a blistering story of obsession, music and obscene money. A story of visionaries, criminals and tycoons. It’s about the greatest pirate in history, the most powerful exec in the music business, and an illegal website six times the size of iTunes.
It begins with a small-time thief at a CD-pressing plant, and a groundbreaking invention on the other side of the globe. Then pans from the multi-million-dollar deals of the music industry to the darkest corners of the web; from German audio laboratories to a tiny Polynesian radio station.
This is also the story of the music industry – the rise of rap, the death of the album, and how much can rest on the flip of a coin. How the fate of artists like Kanye West, Jay-Z and 50 Cent were being controlled by a guy no one had ever heard of. How suddenly all the tracks ever recorded could be accessed by anyone, for free. And the industry imploded.
Ratings and reviews
4.8
19 reviews
Jonny Spence (j0nny)
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September 16, 2015
If you were a 90's music fan with a knowledge of technology then this book is a great insight into the world of mp3, piracy, record labels and how the three all influenced each other.
3 people found this review helpful
Venkata Aditya
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October 15, 2018
I expressed my desire to become an audiophile to a friend, a bibliophile himself. I'm not an avid reader and buying a physical copy is a big thing for me.
2 people found this review helpful
Paul Jackson
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June 20, 2019
Best insight into the battle between the music industry and the pirates you'll ever read. Getting all of this information together in one place is a major achievement in itself.
About the author
A member of what he calls the ‘pirate generation’, Stephen Witt has been bootlegging music since the mid-1990s. While amassing an archive of hundreds of thousands of pirated mp3s, he became obsessed with the subject of digital piracy, and eventually changed careers to write this thrilling investigative history.
He was born in New Hampshire in 1979, raised in the Midwest and graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in mathematics. He spent the next six years working for hedge funds in Chicago and New York. Following a spell in East Africa working in economic development, he graduated from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2011.
He lives in Brooklyn, New York. How Music Got Free is his first book.
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