What happens when an entire generation commits the same crime?

How Music Got Free

The Inventor, the Music Man, and the Thief

One accidental mastermind, one king-pin, two geniuses, and what happens when an entire generation commits the same crime.

Enthralling… A terrific, timely, informative book… Witt is an authoritative, enthusiastic, sure-footed guide, and his research and his storytelling are exemplary… How Music Got Free stands comparison to The Social Network

Incredible, possibly canonical. . . . A story that's too bizarre to make up, but needed to be told. . . . Even if you're not a music geek, How Music Got Free is one of the most gripping investigative books of the year.

Like Bond meets 28 Days Later... Witt tells a thrilling tale, with a cast of music biz bigwigs, painstaking German boffins, and pirates and petty thieves. Witt’s writing reminded me of all my favourite modern essayists: Remnick, Franzen and John Jeremiah Sullivan. I loved it

Brilliant... Like many great works of investigative journalism it makes it clear that this is one of those stories you think you know until you realise you don’t

A fantastic book and a scintillating achievement

Felix Martin, author of Money: the unauthorised biography

[How Music Got Free] has the clear writing and brisk reportorial acumen of a Michael Lewis book

Reads like an underworld crime story… Engaging even on the tech side of the story… Witt is concise and very funny

Closely reported and brilliantly written … highly entertaining… Exemplary in its clarity… this story is full of surprises as well

This is the definitive history of a media revolution… I was hooked late into the night… There are lots of big lessons here… it is the story of all creative industries, and in the end, the internet itself

You need to get hold of Stephen Witt's jaundiced, whip-smart, superbly reported and indispensable How Music Got Free

Fascinating… An engrossing story… surely the year's most important music book

An accomplished first book… So compelling

Lucid, page-turning, engaging… A cross between a nail-biting true-crime story and the type of blow-by-blow books penned by Bob Woodward… Deeply sourced and dramatic

Witt's first book has great strengths — primarily that he is a natural storyteller, with an eye for character and the ability to digest large amounts of technical detail, and turn it into a colourful tale

Scorching investigative history of how the music industry found itself staring catastrophe in the face... Full of colourful characters... Essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of our creative industries

This is a riveting account of greed, huge characters and the collapse of a kind of empire, and will be the benchmark by which future books are judged

The richest explanation to date about how the arrival of the MP3 upended almost everything about how music is distributed, consumed and stored

Definitive exploration of the turmoil the music industry has experiences in the last 20 years

Hats off to Witt…because the book he’s delivered is sensational: lucid, informative, breathlessly exciting, with the pounding narrative tempo of a first-class thriller

Witt brings the many-layered tale to vibrant life

Witt’s sharp prose and pace grips... His narrative hurtles like a thriller toward the “sin cleansing” development of iTunes and the profit shift from recorded to live music. It is – in both senses – a ripping yarn

One of the most gripping investigative books of the year - my mind reels at who will play Glover in the inevitable movie adaptation

An exhaustive and entertaining account of how digital music piracy started, what effect it had on the industry and who was involved

Jaundiced, whip-smart, superbly reported and indispensable

Brilliant… Witt's account is every bit as riveting as a thriller… Required reading for anybody interested in how we came to consume music today

It’s a truly terrific read. Thoughtful, compelling, action-packed (surprisingly), utterly robust and guaranteed to be one of those nonfictions you rip through as if it was a novel by your favourite author

A terrific tale of music piracy at the dawn of the digital era

The collapse of the music industry, thanks to the emergence of the internet and illegal downloading, is told here with all the urgency and colour of a thriller

Witt tells the captivating and tense story of how the digital music revolution transformed the music industry, and made criminals out of many of us. Read it to learn all about a landmark moment in music and technology that still affects us today.

His book is a tour de force, delving into the criminal underworld of hackers and pilferers as well as the complacent corporate boardroom

A must-read.  It flows like a captivating novel.

Page-&shy;turner about how piracy nearly destroyed the established music industry.

Witt skillfully and thoroughly documents this “warez” scene of file sharers… Absolutely enthralling, and occasionally cinematic.

A member of what he calls the ‘pirate generation’, Stephen Witt has been bootlegging music since the mid-1990s. While amassing an archive of hundreds of thousands of pirated mp3s, he became obsessed with the subject of digital piracy, and eventually changed careers to write this thrilling investigative history. 
 
He was born in New Hampshire in 1979, raised in the Midwest and graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in mathematics. He spent the next six years working for hedge funds in Chicago and New York. Following a spell in East Africa working in economic development, he graduated from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2011. 
 
He lives in Brooklyn, New York. How Music Got Free is his first book.

NOW A MAJOR NEW DOCUMENTARY SERIES 
 
What links Taylor Swift to a factory worker? 
Kanye West to a German engineer? 
Beyoncé to a boardroom mogul? 
 
They’ve all changed the face of the music business, in the most unexpected ways. 
 
How Music Got Free is the incredible true story of how online piracy and the MP3 revolutionised the way our world works, one track at a time. 
 
‘This brilliant book tells you exactly how the perfect storm that forever changed the way we consume music took shape. Like many great works of investigative journalism it makes it clear that this is one of those stories you think you know. Until you realise you don’t’ John Niven, The Spectator 
 
‘Reads like an underworld crime story… concise and very funny… The most remarkable thing about Witt’s book is that virtually none of the names is familiar… Witt finds unlikely heroes in unlikely places’ New Statesman

Stephen Richard Witt

Gripping and brilliantly told, this is the amazing story of the improbable origins of one of the most important technologies of our times

Mustafa Suleyman, author of The Coming Wave and CEO of Microsoft AI

Stephen Witt’s deep reporting shines through every page of The Thinking Machine. The result is a page-turning biography of perhaps the most consequential CEO and company in the world

The Thinking Machine brilliantly captures the riveting, unlikely story of Jensen Huang’s Nvidia—a company driving the exponential growth of artificial intelligence and humanity's inevitable merger with technology. Stephen Witt’s exceptional reporting offers a rare glimpse into the pioneers driving humanity’s leap toward an infinite future

Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Nearer

A delicious account of how a scrawny Taiwanese immigrant, with an intense commitment to reason, loyalty to people, and a Stakhanovite work ethic, built the engine of the AI revolution

Michael Moritz, former Chairman, Sequoia Capital

The AI revolution that defines this decade, and probably this century, rests on the shoulders of a shockingly small number of geniuses; and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is prominent among them. Witt’s superb portrait is both entertaining and disquieting, capturing an indispensable, elusive, and isolated man: the hardware wizard behind the machines that are careering toward something very much like sentience

Sebastian Mallaby, New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Law

Before reading The Thinking Machine, I didn't understand just how much the rise of Jensen Huang and Nvidia explains the sudden explosion of artificial intelligence. Stephen Witt’s sweeping narrative offers a roadmap to the various forces rapidly changing our lives, tucked into the wild insider story of how one of our strangest and most singular entrepreneurs—in an era chock full of them—not only built a remarkable company but also helped to usher in our brave new world

Reeves Wiedeman, author of Billion Dollar Loser

PRAISE FOR HOW MUSIC GOT FREE 
 
Terrific, timely, informative ... [Witt's] research and storytelling are exemplary ... How Music Got Free stands comparison to The Social Network

Incredible, possibly canonical ... A story that's too bizarre to make up, but needed to be told ... How Music Got Free is one of the most gripping investigative books of the year

You need to get hold of Stephen Witt's jaundiced, whip-smart, superbly report and indispensable How Music Got Free

Closely reported and brilliantly written ... Highly entertaining

Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip

The riveting account of Nvidia, the tech company that has exploded in value for its artificial intelligence computing hardware, and Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s charismatic, uncompromising CEO. 
 
In June of 2024, spurred by the frenzy of investment following the launch of ChatGPT, and thirty-one years after its founding in a Denny’s restaurant, Nvidia became the most-valuable corporation on Earth. In The Thinking Machine, acclaimed journalist Stephen Witt recounts the unlikely story of how a manufacturer of video game components shocked Silicon Valley by conquering the market for AI hardware, and in the process re-invented the computer. 
 
Essential to Nvidia’s meteoric success is its visionary CEO Jensen Huang, who more than a decade ago, on the basis of a few promising scientific results, bet his entire company on AI. Through unprecedented access to Huang, his friends, his investors, and his employees, Witt documents for the first time the company’s epic rise and its iconoclastic CEO, who emerges as a compelling, single-minded, and ferocious leader, and now one of Silicon Valley’s most influential figures. 
 
The Thinking Machine is the story of how Nvidia evolved from providing components for circuit boards to supplying hundred-million dollar supercomputers. It is the story of a determined entrepreneur who defied Wall Street to push his radical vision for computing, in the process becoming one of the wealthiest men alive. It is the story of a revolution in computer architecture, and the small group of renegade engineers who made it happen. And it’s the story of our awesome and terrifying AI future, which Huang has billed as the 'next industrial revolution', as a new kind of microchip unlocks hyper-realistic avatars, autonomous robots, self-driving cars, and new movies, art, and books, generated on command.

Stephen Richard Witt

Praise for The Thinking Machine

Gripping and brilliantly told, this is the amazing story of the improbable origins of one of the most important technologies of our times

Stephen Witt’s deep reporting shines through every page of The Thinking Machine. The result is a page-turning biography of perhaps the most consequential CEO and company in the world

The Thinking Machine brilliantly captures the riveting, unlikely story of Jensen Huang’s Nvidia—a company driving the exponential growth of artificial intelligence and humanity's inevitable merger with techno ...

Gripping and brilliantly told, this is the amazing story of the improbable origins of one of the most important technologies of our times

Stephen Witt’s deep reporting shines through every page of The Thinking Machine. The result is a page-turning biography of perhaps the most consequential CEO and company in the world

The Thinking Machine brilliantly captures the riveting, unlikely story of Jensen Huang’s Nvidia—a company driving the exponential growth of artificial intelligence and humanity's inevitable merger with techno ...

Gripping and brilliantly told, this is the amazing story of the improbable origins of one of the most important technologies of our times

Stephen Witt’s deep reporting shines through every page of The Thinking Machine. The result is a page-turning biography of perhaps the most consequential CEO and company in the world

The Thinking Machine brilliantly captures the riveting, unlikely story of Jensen Huang’s Nvidia—a company driving the exponential growth of artificial intelligence and humanity's inevitable merger with techno ...

Books by Stephen Richard Witt

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