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 piracy efforts online 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 presentation 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]
Witt writes about the obscure online community known as 'The Scene', particularly describing the efforts of the Rabid Neurosis (RNS) group to illegally spread copyrighted material. A North Carolina manufacturing plant employee named Dell Glover, his life described in detail by Witt, discovers that he has the ability to get his hands on albums before their official release dates and goes on to work with RNS leaking hundreds upon hundreds of discs. Artists such as Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, Eminem, Kanye West, and Jay-Z have their material distributed online due to Glover's actions. Witt states that Glover and RNS became the world’s premier music pirates, possibly costing the record industry millions of dollars.[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". Bayard additionally stated that technology has created a period of "uneasy times, and no one should go too easy on himself", finding the recent trends troubling himself.[1]
See also
- Data compression of audio
- Legal aspects of file-sharing
- Music industry
- Music piracy
- Rabid Neurosis
- 'Warez scene'
References
- ^ a b c d e Louis Bayard (June 19, 2015). "Stephen Witt's 'How Music Got Free' explains just that". The Washington Post. Retrieved August 20, 2015.
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