Stephen Richard Witt

Meet Dell Glover – the accidental pirate Meet ‘Kali’ – the mastermind And meet Karlheinz – the man who made it all possible How Music Got Free is a blistering story of obsession, music and obscene money. A story of visionaries, criminals and tycoons. It’s about the greatest pirate in history, the most powerful exec in the music business, and an illegal website six times the size of iTunes. It begins with a small-time thief at a CD-pressing plant, and a groundbreaking invention on the other side of the globe. Then pans from the multi-million-dollar deals of the music industry to the darkest corners of the web; from German audio laboratories to a tiny Polynesian radio station. This is also the story of the music industry – the rise of rap, the death of the album, and how much can rest on the flip of a coin. How the fate of artists like Kanye West, Jay-Z and 50 Cent were being controlled by a guy no one had ever heard of. How suddenly all the tracks ever recorded could be accessed by anyone, for free. And the industry imploded.

What happens when an entire generation commits the same crime?

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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