Book: How Music Got Free (Stephen Witt, 2015)
Context
Once again, I stumbled upon that book in a Slashdot article that I saw on Hacker News.
I ordered it on World of Books, for 2 reasons:
- I wanted to read it in English (in fact I'm not even sure it got translated to French),
- I like the idea behing World of Books: reselling books that people don't want anymore, because they read them and want to pass them along.
My thoughts
The author spent years studying the subject, and the story is told in a very pleasant way: from the invention of mp3 by Karlheinz Brandenburg in the late 80's/early 90's (with the "standard war" against Philips/mp2), to how Doug Morris managed to make his way up to head Universal Music, with in between Dell Glover becoming an "accidental pirate" by smuggling out music out of the PolyGram compact disct plant where he was working - this is truly a fascinating story.
The book is well written, and I read it frantically because I wanted to know how it would end (even though I knew it already). The fact that each chapter switches from one character to another also adds to the rythm of the book.
TL;DR: I absolutely loved the book, I learnt a lot of things on the topic (e.g. I forgot the story around MP3), so I highly recommend it.
Tags: Books