How Music Got Free
This book 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. Witt 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. - Publisher.
Stats for nerds
8recommend
11mentions
11people
2015–2026years
73% recommend27% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Do you think the difference between film piracy and music piracy is inherent, due to the differences between film and music; or is there some alternative reality where we ended up with a one-stop shop for films, as well?
For the history of music piracy, I found" How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy" was a good book to read.
- Why Tom's Dinner? Because it is a cappella. There's a book "How Music Got Free" by Stephen Witt [1] detailing the history of mp3 format and related events. It is a very good read and there's an explanation
Increases in processing power spurred progress. Within a year Brandenburg’s algorithm was handling a wide variety of recorded music... But one audio source was proving intractable: what Grill, with his imperfect command of English, called “the lonely voice.” (He meant “lone.”) Human speech could not, in isolation, be psychoacoustically masked. Nor could you use Huffman’s pattern recognition approach—the essence of speech was its dynamic nature, its plosives and sibilants and glottal stops. Brandenburg’s shrinking algorithm could handle symphonies, guitar solos, cannons, even “Oye Mi Canto,” but it still couldn’t handle a newscast. Stuck, Brandenburg isolated samples of “lonely” voices. The first was a recording of a difficult German dialect that had plagued audio engineers for years. The second was a snippet of Suzanne Vega singing the opening bars of “Tom’s Diner,” her 1987 radio hit.
- A great book on the recent history of music piracy and the advent of the MP3 is How Music Got Free:
https://www.amazon.com/How-Music-Got-Free-Obsession/dp/01431...
- I highly recommend "How Music Got Free" for an entertaining and illuminating read of MP3 and how it changed the world - for the better or worse.
It also delves into how Fraunhofer (and its creator) benefited monetarily from its adoption.
Link - https://www.amazon.com/How-Music-Got-Free-Obsession-ebook/dp...
- Also read the "how music got free" book, covers allot of that stuff.
- Anybody looking to know more about the origins/organization behind What.cd would do well to check out Stephen Witt's monumental book on the subject: How Music Got Free (https://www.amazon.com/How-Music-Got-Free-Obsession/dp/01431...)
