How Music Got Free
How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy is a non-fiction book by journalist Stephen Witt. The book chronicles the invention of the mp3 format for audio information, detailing the efforts by researchers such as Karlheinz Brandenburg to analyze human hearing and successfully compress songs in a form that can be easily transmitted. Witt also documents the rise of the warez scene and spread of internet piracy while detailing the campaigns by music industry executives such as Doug Morris to adapt to changing technology.[1]
Background and book contents
The book notes that, at a presentation to the Fraunhofer Society, Brandenburg and his team's presentating of the technology that could re-create the fidelity of a recording on a CD at one-twelfth the size created a stir. "Do you realize what you’ve done?" asked a listener to the team. "You’ve killed the music industry!"[1]
"On websites and underground file servers across the world," Witt states, "the number of mp3 files in existence grew by several orders of magnitude. In dorm rooms everywhere incoming college freshmen found their hard drives filled to capacity with pirated mp3s". He also writes, "Music piracy became to the late ’90s what drug experimentation was to the late ’60s: a generation-wide flouting of both social norms and the existing body of law, with little thought of consequences."[1]
Reviews and responses
The Washington Post published an article by writer Louis Bayard praising the book, with Bayard commenting that he found the work "whip-smart, superbly reported, and indispensable".[1]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d Louis Bayard. "Stephen Witt's 'How Music Got Free' explains just that". The Washington Post. Retrieved August 20, 2015.
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