Book: Stephen Witt — How music got free

In today’s ‘What to Read’, we have Stephen Witt’s book How Music Became Free. It’s a good story about the struggle between pirates and majors, about the struggle between the concepts of free and paid creativity. The narrative is based on three stories: how and why the mp3 format was created (and why it’s mp3 and not mp2 or mp0), the backstage of the music industry in America in the 1990s (the deal between the majors and hip-hop labels to promote rappers), and the pirate scene (monitoring releases, insiders in the factories, leaking albums online a month before the official release).