ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST BOOKS: The Washington Post • The Financial Times • Slate • The Atlantic • Time • Forbes

“[How Music Got Free] has the clear writing and brisk reportorial acumen of a Michael Lewis book.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

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 two thousand 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 book 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 page-turning 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 artform, 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-read history of the Internet itself.

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One by one he repeated this process, until the bag was empty. When he had finished, he gathered the ruined drives in his arms, then threw them in a nearby dumpster, on top of thousands of others. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It took me nearly five years to write this book, and the list of people who assisted me is long. Several professors at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism provided invaluable guidance and support, particularly Sam Freedman, Kelly McMasters, Kristen Lombardi, John Bennet,

experience, he instructed his scouts to research local markets carefully and to stay on the lookout for regionally trending hits. Something interesting soon came back up the pipe: a New Orleans rap conglomerate by the name of Cash Money Records. An independent label, Cash Money had signed dozens of local rappers who, in certain record stores in the South, were managing to outsell even Universal’s best-established acts. Sensing opportunity beyond the parishes of Louisiana, Cash Money was now

as well. But the most vocal opposition came from a surprising source: the head of the RIAA herself. Hilary Rosen thought suing the file-sharers was a disastrous policy, guaranteed to alienate fans and leave a stain on the industry’s reputation that could last for decades. In a series of heated discussions with the label reps in late 2002 and 2003, she argued her case and made it known that she would not, under any circumstances, be the face of Project Hubcap. She was overruled. On September 7,

theoretically illegal, they thought of themselves as pranksters, not felons. Both were surprised that APC was even a target, as there were many other more visible, more damaging groups. Adding to their confusion was their arraignment in Virginia. No member of APC actually lived in that state, none of the leaked CDs had come from there, and the FBI’s honeypot had been hosted in Florida. Prabhu explained that this was because of the crime they’d been charged with: not larceny, nor fraud, but

something even more radical: that the difficulties music executives like Doug Morris had experienced deploying capital over the past decade were shared in an increasing number of industries. In a world of digital abundance, it was getting harder to earn a profit. This point was later made succinctly by Izabella Kaminska, a blogger for the Financial Times, who translated the Pirates’ arguments into macroeconomic terms. Discussing the inability of the world’s central bankers to engineer growth,

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