How Music Got Free
Stephen Witt’s book, “How Music Got Free”, brought to light how easy it was for people to steal music using technology. “…the Internet was made of people…Piracy was a social phenomenon…” (Witt p.3). It was the norm for people to steal music and everyone was involved from engineers to criminals according to Witt. Even Witt himself admitted to this when he was in college and owned an mp3 player, which was packed with “bootlegged songs.” The amount of evidence that was found wasn’t as surprising to me as it was to Witt. This is probably because my generation is constantly looking for a way to get things for free and take short-cuts to benefit ourselves. I could argue this is only fair since we are required to pay more compared to older generations for college, concert tickets, living, technology, etc. Work smarter not harder right? Witt refers to this generation as the “pirate generation”, but a lot of people pay for their music through Apple or Spotify. I myself have Spotify premium which I pay for monthly in order to have access to countless songs. It is a great app that allows me to organize my music and discover new artists/songs that are appealing to me. Some may argue that artists do not make enough through this. However, the prices of their concert tickets and the opportunities they have, like being sponsored by large companies through their music makes up for this.