I don't usually talk about books on this blog, but my latest read corresponds perfectly to the editorial line of Byothe.fr... So I had to tell you about it, because I learned a lot of fascinating things!
Indeed, How Music Got Free (Storming the record empire in its French version) is a book written by the American journalist Stephen Witt which tells the whole story of the music industry through MP3 piracy.
This book of just under 300 pages addresses many of the issues that have transformed the music industry. First, we discover the (fascinating) history of the MP3 format, first abandoned for reasons of big money (in favor of the MP2 standard) and then finally adopted thanks in particular to music piracy on the web.
Then the author tells us about the emergence of music exchanges on the Internet, first in very organized but very closed groups... we discover how these groups were able to put most of the new records from the early 2000s online before their official release in stores.
We also discover the impact of the emergence of MP3 players, because as long as MP3s remained on a computer it was impossible to use them on a daily basis for running, for playing music at parties, etc.
At the same time, Witt paints a portrait of the record industry, the consolidation of the majors and their attempts to combat the democratization of piracy.
This is the story of the biggest hack in history, of a revolutionary invention that brought down the major labels, of an illegal website that offered four times more music than the iTunes Store. This is the story of visionaries and criminals, of moguls and teenage geeks. This is the story of Steve Jobs, of YouTube, of Lil Wayne, of Jay-Z… it is simply the story of the Internet.
The book is available en anglais ou in French (in paper or ebook version) and I highly recommend it if you want to find out a little more about a hack that affected an entire generation, the generation of the first Internet users.
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