How Music Got Free
Stephen Witt Viking, 296 pages, $27.95
In an accomplished first book, Stephen Witt considers the nearly 15,000-strong records he collected in his 20s. He built his archive without ever stepping into a record shop, thanks to music piracy on an "industrial scale." In explaining how he, and millions of his peers, were able to get away with it, he weaves a narrative around three people in "How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy."
Part of what makes Witt's story so compelling is that none of these three is quite what he seems. Karlheinz Brandenburg is a German audio engineer who created the MP3 format by learning how to record high-fidelity music using very small amounts of data. At a house party Dell Glover realized the DJ was playing yet-to-be-released recordings that had been smuggled out of the CD-pressing plant. He learned about MP3s and soon became "the world's leading leaker of pre-release music." As the leaks became impossible to ignore, Doug Morris, a senior record-label executive, was forced to get a grip on the technology.
There is no happy ending. Piracy has become so widespread, it caused a long-term decline in record sales, whereas legal digital stores, such as Apple's iTunes, enabled songs to be sold on a piecemeal basis. The piracy-induced switch from owning a record collection to renting one has cost both record shops and artists dearly.
THE ECONOMIST
