How Music Got Free
The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy
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Narrated by:
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Stephen Witt
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By:
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Stephen Witt
About this listen
"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 2,000 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 audiobook 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 pause-resisting 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 art form 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-listen history of the Internet itself.
©2015 Stephen Witt (P)2015 Hachette AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Losing the Signal is a riveting story of a company that toppled global giants before succumbing to the ruthlessly competitive forces of Silicon Valley. This is not a conventional tale of modern business failure by fraud and greed. The rise and fall of BlackBerry reveals the dangerous speed at which innovators race along the information superhighway.
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Fascinating
- By Gerardo A Dada on 09-05-15
By: Jacquie McNish, and others
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No Better Time
- The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet
- By: Molly Knight Raskin
- Narrated by: Christine Marshall
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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No Better Time tells of a young, driven mathematical genius who wrote a set of algorithms that would create a faster, better Internet. It's the story of a beautiful friendship between a loud, irreverent student and his soft-spoken MIT professor, of a husband and father who spent years struggling to make ends meet only to become a billionaire almost overnight with the success of Akamai Technologies, the Internet content delivery network he cofounded with his mentor.
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An Overlooked Hero of 9-11
- By Jean on 05-27-16
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Kingpin
- How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground
- By: Kevin Poulsen
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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The word spread through the hacking underground like some unstoppable new virus: Someone - some brilliant, audacious crook - had just staged a hostile takeover of an online criminal network that siphoned billions of dollars from the U.S. economy. The FBI rushed to launch an ambitious undercover operation aimed at tracking down this new kingpin. Other agencies around the world deployed dozens of moles and double agents.
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This should be a movie
- By Hijenks on 05-19-15
By: Kevin Poulsen
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Frenemies
- The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (And Everything Else)
- By: Ken Auletta
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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An intimate and profound reckoning with the changes buffeting the $2 trillion global advertising and marketing business from the perspective of its most powerful players, by the best-selling author of Googled. Advertising and marketing touches on every corner of our lives, and is the invisible fuel powering almost all media. Complain about it though we might, without it the world would be a darker place. And of all the industries wracked by change in the digital age, few have been turned on its head as dramatically as this one has.
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Good; not for beginners
- By DV on 10-05-18
By: Ken Auletta
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Alibaba
- The House That Jack Ma Built
- By: Duncan Clark
- Narrated by: Jim Meskimen
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In just a decade and a half, Jack Ma, a man from modest beginnings who started out as an English teacher, founded Alibaba and built it into one of the world's largest companies, an e-commerce empire on which hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers depend. Alibaba's $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the largest global IPO ever. A Rockefeller of his age who is courted by CEOs and presidents around the world, Jack is an icon for China's booming private sector.
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Strange: Best part of story happens "off-screen"
- By Tristan on 09-02-16
By: Duncan Clark
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Service Games
- The Rise and Fall of SEGA: Enhanced Edition
- By: Sam Pettus
- Narrated by: Tom Racine
- Length: 17 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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New Edition! More content, images, and corrected text and facts. Monochrome edition. Starting with its humble beginnings in the 1950s and ending with its swan-song, the Dreamcast, in the early 2000s, this is the complete history of Sega as a console maker. Before home computers and video game consoles, before the Internet and social networking, and before motion controls and smartphones, there was Sega.
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The Story of the Fall of Sega
- By Austin on 01-05-15
By: Sam Pettus
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Automate This
- How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World
- By: Christopher Steiner
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 7 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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It used to be that to diagnose an illness, interpret legal documents, analyze foreign policy, or write a newspaper article you needed a human being with specific skills - and maybe an advanced degree or two. These days, high-level tasks are increasingly being handled by algorithms that can do precise work not only with speed but also with nuance. These "bots" started with human programming and logic, but now their reach extends beyond what their creators ever expected.
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good start, book runs out of sustenace
- By RealTruth on 02-15-13
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Trade-Off
- Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don't
- By: Kevin Maney
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 6 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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In Trade-Off, Kevin Maney shows how these conflicting forces determine the success, or failure, of new products and services in the marketplace. He shows that almost every decision we make as consumers involves a trade-off between fidelity and convenience between the products we love and the products we need.
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No Trade-Offs for Reading Trade-Off
- By Joshua Kim on 06-10-12
By: Kevin Maney
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The King of Content
- Sumner Redstone’s Battle for Viacom, CBS, and Everlasting Control of His Media Empire
- By: Keach Hagey
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Sumner Murray Redstone, once feared as the “mad genius” of media who would dump his CEOs for mere wobbles in his companies’ stock price, had built one of the world’s greatest media empires through a series of audacious takeovers constructed to ensure that he always maintained control. Today he controls 80 percent of the voting shares of both Viacom and CBS, meaning that on a whim he could replace the entire boards of two public companies with a combined value of $40 billion.
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Feels biased. Well researched, but not engaging.
- By Anonymous User on 04-03-19
By: Keach Hagey
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Exploding the Phone
- The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell
- By: Phil Lapsley
- Narrated by: Johann North
- Length: 12 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Before smartphones, back even before the Internet and personal computer, a misfit group of technophiles, blind teenagers, hippies, and outlaws figured out how to hack the world’s largest machine: the telephone system. Starting with Alexander Graham Bell’s revolutionary "harmonic telegraph", by the middle of the 20th century the phone system had grown into something extraordinary, a web of cutting-edge switching machines and human operators that linked together millions of people like never before. But the network had a billion-dollar flaw, and once people discovered it, things would never be the same.
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Great Story along with Great Technical Research
- By Elsa Braun on 04-25-16
By: Phil Lapsley
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Alibaba's World
- How a Remarkable Chinese Company Is Changing the Face of Global Business
- By: Porter Erisman
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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In September 2014, a Chinese company that most Americans had never heard of held the largest IPO in history - bigger than Google, Facebook, and Twitter combined. Alibaba, now the world's largest ecommerce company, mostly escaped Western notice for over 10 years, while building a customer base larger than Amazon's and handling the bulk of ecommerce transactions in China. How did it happen? And what was it like to be along for such a revolutionary ride?
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Not bad
- By Daniel on 09-12-15
By: Porter Erisman
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The Network
- The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age
- By: Scott Woolley
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the origin story of the airwaves - the foundational technology of the communications age - as told through the 40-year friendship of an entrepreneurial industrialist and a brilliant inventor. David Sarnoff, the head of RCA and equal parts Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, and William Randolph Hearst, was the greatest supporter of his friend, Edwin Armstrong, developer of the first amplifier, the modern radio transmitter, and FM radio.
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The Classic Struggle
- By Jean on 06-01-16
By: Scott Woolley
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The Click Moment
- Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World
- By: Frans Johansson
- Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt
- Length: 7 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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On the one hand we aren’t surprised by the uncertainty of everyday life, but on the other we believe that success can be analyzed and planned for. It is a revealing paradox. The implications are explosive and they obliterate every common-sense notion we have about strategy and planning. The Click Moment is about two very simple but highly provocative ideas.
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Outstanding book!
- By Anilyn Karel on 08-26-24
By: Frans Johansson
What listeners say about How Music Got Free
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Daniel
- 05-24-17
AWESOME book
What did you love best about How Music Got Free?
This was an extremely well written book that told an extremely interesting story and blended 3 stories together in a flawless manner.
What was one of the most memorable moments of How Music Got Free?
Personally, I lived through a lot of the moments in this book and remember vividly owning the first Diamond MP3 player, downloading scores of illegal music through bots on IRC and the progression from Napster, to crap like Kazaa, Limewire and Morpheus to torrents and beyond. Loved it.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
No
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- Christopher
- 07-16-15
Pirate's Delight
Outstanding story well told by the author. Will resonate with many former and current music pirates in tons of fun and interesting ways. Really enjoyed hearing the stories behind the invention of the MP3, the scene, RNS, OiNk's Pink Palace, VEVO and more. Great job!
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1 person found this helpful
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- Alvin Benjamin Carter III
- 07-15-15
Explains a generation!
This is an excellent story with real life accounts of how one generation changed the way music was created shared and distributed legally and illegally. The real interesting part is the technology piece. It goes in depth into how we ended up with the current technology we use everyday on iTunes and Spotify.
Being a young person when all this was going on was exciting, and it is great to hear the deeper level account of what was happening below the public eye. The record industry story line was also interesting. The picture painted is clear, and the stories are real.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Sarah Álvarez
- 02-01-22
Fun to listen
I enjoyed this book. If you like the history of music you will have a good time with this audio book. It's well written to give you details in the right pace and order.
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- Brandon
- 05-25-17
A needed reading on the modern music industry.
Piracy has changed the face of music, and in more ways that one might think. I highly recommend this book, as it spends time analyzing things most others have looked past or falsely represented.
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- Cliente de Amazon
- 10-22-17
Sí eres melómano debes escucharlo
Excelente! La historia siempre es emocionante y detallada. El narrador parece conocer a fondo a los personajes y la historia.
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- Jay
- 08-06-15
Must read
This book was amazing.
Perfect mix of interesting info and entertaining stories.
Audio performance was also top notch
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- Wanzi
- 12-01-15
Fun
This was an incredible treatment of this issue. I enjoyed every second of it. The author did an incredible job with the topic.
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- M.B.
- 03-23-17
Engaging Narrative of the Rise of the MP3
Any additional comments?
Sometimes books which attempt to weave together different strands of the same story don't work out. However, Witt has managed to successfully do that here in a way that keeps the reader engaged and is framed by a natural successive flow. This work ties together three main stories and characters: 1) the technological innovations which resulted in the MP3 format; 2) the online community of "leakers" who ripped files from the physical CDs and distributed them online; and 3) the higher-ups of the music industry and their reaction (or lack thereof) to the online music movement. In short, Witt does a wonderful job of balancing dense tech-speak, light-hearted prose, and most importantly, a lot of information. Really an amazing job, and as my first audiobook, the delivery, speed, and tone of the narration were all on point!
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- Dre
- 03-27-23
Literally the story of my childhood.
My friends and I saw the rise and fall of of the digital music era of the late 90’s and early 2000’s so this book took me right back to that time. 5 stars.
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