Words on Wednesday: "How Music Got Free"

Stephen Witt's How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy is a story of obsession, music, crime, and money, featuring visionaries and criminals, moguls and tech-savvy teenagers. [The author] traces the history of digital music piracy, from the German audio engineers who invented the mp3, to a North Carolina compact-disc manufacturing plant where factory worker Dell Glover leaked nearly two thousand albums over the course of a decade, to the high-rises of midtown Manhattan where music executive Doug Morris cornered the global market on rap, and, finally, into the darkest recesses of the Internet.