How Music Got Free
How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy (Also published as How Music Got Free: What Happens When an Entire Generation Commits the Same Crime? , How Music Got Free: The Inventor, The Mogul and the Thief, and How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention) is a non-fiction book by journalist Stephen Witt. The book chronicles the invention of the MP3 format for audio information, detailing the efforts by researchers such as Karlheinz Brandenburg, Bernhard Grill and Harald Popp to analyze human hearing and successfully compress songs in a form that can be easily transmitted.