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|title= How Music Got Free: The Inventor, the Music Man, and the Thief

|author=Stephen Witt

|website= http://stephenwittbooks.com

|video=rx7Bdq7kz7A

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'How Music Got Free', as the title ironically suggests, tells us how the industry fell victim to the digital age and, it seems, became fatally devalued in the process. It starts more or less in the mid-1990s with German technological wizard Karlheinz Brandenburg and the development of the mp3, in brief a coding format for digital audio. The convoluted story is one of various formats and technologies, of loading music on to the internet and making it a free-for-all, in more senses than one.