Stephen Witt

The gripping untold story of the music piracy revolution and the man who almost singlehandedly brought down the industry How Music Got Free is the incredible true story of Dell Glover, a factory worker at a compact-disc manufacturing plant who brought the music industry to its knees. Working from a small town in North Carolina, Glover was the Patient Zero of music piracy, leaking thousands of albums from the plant over nearly a decade. If you've ever pirated music?or even borrowed it?Glover's handiwork is on your hard drive. But Glover couldn't do it alone. He needed the help of his smuggling confederates, who conducted a years-long campaign of infiltration into the music industry's global supply chain. He needed the help of the men who invented the mp3, a group of academics working in a forgotten audio laboratory in Germany. He needed the help of the torrenters, who, from dormitories and bedrooms across the planet, built distribution networks for his leaks. Most of all, he needed the unwitting assistance of the music industry itself, and the powerful music executive whose strategy of consolidation brought the biggest musical acts of the decade into Glover's reach. An irresistible story of greed, cunning, brilliance, and deceit, How Music Got Free isn't just a story of the music industry?it's a must-read history of the Internet itself.

The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy

How Music Got Free

Cassandra Tang

To truly model human hearing, they needed human test subjects.

Most listeners didn’t care about quality, and the obsession with perfect sound forever was an early indicator that the music industry didn’t understand its customers.

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