Toward the end of the 20th century, the music business was still relying on its utter control of artists and their output, but at the same time, the technology that would eventually break the industry's hold on music consumers began to flourish.
The MP3 format, along with portable music players like the iPod, ever-increasing bandwidth on the Internet and people like Dell Glover, who worked at a Universal Music CD pressing plant, came together to cause the downfall of the album-oriented popular music industry.
Stephen Witt's How Music Got Free follows this perfect storm of invention and business reality. Witt traces the aspirations of the German audio engineers who invented MP3, as well as the 2,000-plus album leaks that Dell Glover caused as a mid-level supervisor over a 10-year period at a pressing plant in North Carolina. Equally important are the stories of Doug Morris, the savvy music executive who was able to stay employed while the industry fell apart under him, the world's largest music company in the late 1990s, and the gifted pirates who kept the FBI and corporate music interests off their trail for a good long time.
How Music Got Free is a fascinating peek behind the scenes of a worldwide cultural phenomenon that blew apart the music business structure while at the same time creating a new one in which no one company holds all the cards (though a few of them still hold plenty). --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor