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Hacker News Comments on
How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

Stephen Witt · 3 HN comments
HN Books has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention "How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention" by Stephen Witt.
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Amazon Summary
Finalist for the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the 2016 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the 2015 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year One of Billboard ’s 100 Greatest Music Books of All Time A New York Times Editors’ Choice 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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Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this book.
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Aug 22, 2018 · maximp on Theft: A History of Music
A great book on the recent history of music piracy and the advent of the MP3 is How Music Got Free:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Music-Got-Free-Obsession/dp/01431...

Link?

EDIT:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Music-Got-Free-Obsession/dp/01431...

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/books/review/how-music-go...

⬐
Nov 17, 2016 · franzen on What.CD is shutting down
Anybody looking to know more about the origins/organization behind What.cd would do well to check out Stephen Witt's monumental book on the subject: How Music Got Free (https://www.amazon.com/How-Music-Got-Free-Obsession/dp/01431...)
⬐ 1337biz
Wasn't Oink before What? I still have an oink hoodie...
⬐ bpp
I remember the day Oink went down. Sad, but What.cd grew out of it.
⬐ SOLAR_FIELDS
I think this is a good opportunity and time for the rebuild - WCD's front-end infrastructure and database was a spaghetti of PHP and hastily constructed database architecture and the API's left a bit to be desired - though the underlying C++ driving the tracker is probably still pretty solid.
⬐ MrDap
Thank you for this.

I've been a WCD member since 2010. It was my first private tracker. I enjoyed the flavor of the WCD atmosphere, could taste the quality of volume after volume of the essential, goofy, ridiculous and down right trash this amazing site had to offer. What's the old saying? "One man's trash is another man's treasure". From sublime to sensuous; from ordinary to extraordinary; from books to manuscripts, with a keen eye and a sense of self worth, the world was at your fingertips. What.CD was more than just a music site on a private tracker. It was a community...a family! There were people who had resources of commonality and rarity that if you knew how to connect, maaan you had the world on a string.

I refuse to believe such riches are lost forever. WCD will be back in one form or another, and when it returns I hope to be there to greet the new with an open heart and open arms!

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