AvonVilla reviewed How music got free by Stephen Witt
A fundamentally flawed account of music's transformation
3 stars
The turning point in this book is where the author renounces his piratical ways. He takes all his hard drives full of music downloaded illegally from Napster and the like, and destroys them. But why do that? Music got free, only to be locked up again on youtube, where google uses every microgram of surveillance they can muster to make money from their audience. Or spotify, where artists get even less than they did in the bad old days of record company debt bondage, and the profits are used to invest in the global arms industry.
If his title was to be accurate, he would keep his hard drives, and continue to defy the corruption of music capitalism, with a civil disobedience campaign to download as much music as possible and not pay for it. Give me excess of it!
Apart from that, there are some interesting historical accounts, including …
The turning point in this book is where the author renounces his piratical ways. He takes all his hard drives full of music downloaded illegally from Napster and the like, and destroys them. But why do that? Music got free, only to be locked up again on youtube, where google uses every microgram of surveillance they can muster to make money from their audience. Or spotify, where artists get even less than they did in the bad old days of record company debt bondage, and the profits are used to invest in the global arms industry.
If his title was to be accurate, he would keep his hard drives, and continue to defy the corruption of music capitalism, with a civil disobedience campaign to download as much music as possible and not pay for it. Give me excess of it!
Apart from that, there are some interesting historical accounts, including how the mp3 format got started, and how CD factory workers were the source of leaked albums, sabotaging the carefully planned release schedule of the big music companies.