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+--- Thread: How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt (/showthread.php?tid=3459)
How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt - King Bob - 07-21-2015
This is about the rise of mp3 and music piracy and the corresponding decline of the traditional music industry, with more coverage of the former. The writing was good and it was a pretty quick read. It goes into the development of the mp3 and how the RIAA rejection of it almost destined it to become a pirate format. There is the wild story of how one guy at a pressing plant in North Carolina leaked 2000 albums before their releases. And the story of Doug Morris at Universal, who got paid millions per year even though revenues were shrinking. And now performance revenues have surpassed recording revenues, for the first time in about 70 years.
For more historical background, I would pair this with How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music by Elijah Wald (who also wrote an excellent book on Robert Johnson). Despite the provocative title, the Beatles figure very little into the book, which is much more about the history or recorded music and the push-pull of that with live performance.