It Wasn’t Just Napster That Tanked the Music Biz
Every music lover remembers how drastically the world shifted at the turn of the millennium with the introduction of the MP3; all of a sudden, file-sharing made it possible to find any song you wanted at any time. But where did the music come from and why would Apple release the 10,000-song capacity iPod in 2001, knowing full well that no one would pay $1 per song to (legally) fill it?
A new documentary, How Music Got Free, attempts to answer those questions while introducing its audience to a slew of pertinent characters—from A-list artists to music pirates themselves—along the way.
Released Tuesday on Paramount+ and executive-produced by LeBron James and Eminem, the two-part documentary details how file-sharing technology led to some of the biggest, most disruptive online leaks of new music, much to the industry’s horror. The doc is based on the book of the same name by Stephen Witt, who together with director Alex Stapleton (Shut Up & Dribble; Hello, Privilege. It’s Me, Chelsea) set out to explore how “an entire generation got used to the idea that music should be free.”