How Music Got Free

I went into this book not knowing much besides the title. I expected more of an in-depth examination of the way that music has become gradually devalued in American society. What I got was something much different but highly engaging.

How Music Got Free is one of those books you'd classify as “narrative nonfiction”: it recounts the facts of its subject with fidelity, but it reads like a fast-paced novel. Witt uses the stories of a select few key players in music technology, business, and piracy, respectively, to tell the story of the massive technological and cultural shift in 21st century music consumption. Witt's book did not teach me quite what I expected to learn, but I ended up learning a lot regardless.

The author's background in journalism is noted in the style of the text. Witt balances his wide vocabulary with clear explanations of the topics at hand, including some that are quite technical, such as the compression process used to reduce the size of .mp3 files. The result is a breezy read (I finished the book in about a week) sans condescension.

There are some mildly distracting flaws in the narrative and in its presentation. The author's insistence on providing detailed physical descriptions of the people about whom he writes is a bit jarring and cartoonish. He also takes a few political jabs at various targets—Alan Greenspan, the Iraq War, capitalism itself—and I agreed with all of these jabs, but they felt a bit out of place. I'm entering really nitpicky territory here, but Witt overuses commas, unnecessarily separating two verbs of a sentence when the subject is not restated.

If you're interested in the effect of piracy on the music industry in the 2000s, you won't regret picking up this book. Witt covers the development of the .mp3 as well, but if you are interested in that area, there are probably better texts to reference, as the engineers themselves become minor players as the narrative progresses.