How Music Got Free is a riveting story of obsession, music, crime, and money, featuring visionaries and criminals, moguls and tech-savvy teenagers—who revolutionized an entire artform. The book is about the greatest pirate in history, the most powerful executive in the music business, a revolutionary invention and an illegal website four times the size of the iTunes Music Store. Journalist Stephen Witt traces the secret history of underworld digital media pirates, from the German audio engineers who invented the mp3, to a North Carolina compact-disc manufacturing plant where nearly two thousand albums of over a decade were leaked, finally, into the darkest recesses of the Internet- all that transformed our digital lives.