This is a fascinating and engaging book about the invention of the .mp3, the recent history of the music industry and its reaction to piracy, and the pirates themselves. Witt does an amazing job making the stories personal, focusing on a generation of men who got rich off of music in some way, and how they fared as the industry changed.

Absolutely fascinating, well-researched, and great writing

Witt tells a compelling story but stumbles at points where he attempts to juggle multiple stories, and also unwittingly jams opinions on his own music tastes into the narrative at jarring moments.

He attempts to tell the tale of the development of the MP3 as an audio format, the history of piracy primarily through the experience of a "patient zero" of piracy, a blue collar CD stamping plant worker in North Carolina, and the tale of music executives who brought pop music to where it is today. In all honesty, I think he could have dropped the MP3 development story, as its probably the most wonky throughout the book. Over all though, it was a worthwhile read.

A little dense, if you’re not used to reading non-fiction but extremely educational. I found out about this book (and another one called The Nineties) after watching an extremely informative YouTube video by Mic the Snare: The Music that Defined the 1990s. The title is self-explanatory and it is pretty obvious that you cannot separate the evolution of 90s music from the technological boom of the decade. I absolutely loved it, and needed to know more.

I read The Nineties first, which is more of a complete picture of the USA during that period, and I was mesmerised with its first two chapters —those about music and technology, of course. This book takes both topics and explains them in great detail (sometimes even too much, that’s my only complaint). It’s all modern history, with facts that every Millennial will more or less remember, but contextualised and linked throughout the years (from the mid-90s to the early 2010s), based on first hand testimonies. Highly recommended. I can see it made into a Netflix limited series, just like The Playlist and The Billion Dollar Code.

I enjoyed reading and reccomend this book to everyone who was witnessing the modern history of internet or is interested in learning about it. Some of the subjects this book is covering are - mp3 history, winamp, piratery, thepiratebay, cd/music industry, p2p ...