具体描述
How Music Got Free is a riveting story of obsession, music, crime, and money, featuring visionaries and criminals, moguls and tech-savv y 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.
用户评价
##原以为是议论文，没想到是侦探小说…精彩
##系统地梳理了音乐数字化以及盗版的发展史。MP3技术出现，唱片公司员工偷窃样品，包括后期的BT技术，到现在的streaming，彻底颠覆了一个行业
##壮阔无比的音乐盗版史，线索横陈，因果无迹。真是妙笔生花。
##两群geeks的故事，how mp3 killed music industry. 非常好看。如某些评论所说，很适合拍纪录片，其实拍个像social network的电影也是可以的。没有太久之前的短短20多年历史，某些也算是经历过的。
##在VeryCD和BT/PT下载的神话中长大的两代人绝对会感兴趣的一本书。从MP3的诞生起头，讲述了互联网发展和数据压缩技术伴生的PTP传输盗版史及同时期唱片业变迁。聚焦关键人物的写法虽然引人入胜，大事件的前因后果就只能被浓缩进夹叙夹议的抒情里了，殊为可惜。
##好看！同样作为下载一代，在远东大陆懵懵懂懂地参与了几乎每一步的风潮的变化。而其中技术的变化是我读了博士之后才了解的，对行业的影响更是从没想过。作者从几个看似毫不相关的线头切入后又编织成一个你我都在其中的故事，读起来像是侦探小说一样过瘾。
##两群geeks的故事，how mp3 killed music industry. 非常好看。如某些评论所说，很适合拍纪录片，其实拍个像social network的电影也是可以的。没有太久之前的短短20多年历史，某些也算是经历过的。
##很好看。MP3发明者、唱片公司老板、盗版组织核心成员，三个角度交织描绘出了MP3、CD、盗版的兴衰，以及听音乐这事是怎么逐渐走到现在这一步的。
##荡气回肠