Very interesting history of the development of digital music, though the narrative structure is lacking. Witt tries to tie large-scale economic actions into the lives of 4 individuals, which should work, but is often bogged down by meandering vignettes and pointless details about these people that feel perfunctory. Also worth nothing that the main person of interest is a southern Black man and the narrative doesn't touch on how that impacted his life (and sentencing) much. 

Witt also takes a lot of needless potshots at musical artists for the sake of, what, levity? It just undermines the journalistic integrity of the piece. Anyway, good info, interesting, if shallow, economic postulating, but could have used serious editing. 

I grew up right as the first age of Internet piracy was dying. I can't code or anything like that, but I was the kid who would jailbreak your iPhone for $10. I heard older kids talk about Napster and LimeWire, but I was too young to have used the sites.

After streaming took off, it seemed as though we entered a second age of digital piracy. The RIAA and MPAA have essentially stopped trying to bring lawsuits against pirates, and the feds only pursue the hosts of the biggest platforms, people like Kim Dotcom or those behind the sports streaming sites.

I always wondered what changed behind the scenes. Between my iPod Nano and first iPhone years later, piracy became accepted, even easy.

Now I get it.

The prosecution suffered two humiliating losses in the RNS trial,

and the music industry started making more money from concerts and merch than from actual music sales. I'm so glad I read this book and put together some puzzle pieces that would have always mystified me.