Soon to be an Apple TV+ documentary series One of Billboard's 100 Greatest Music Books of All Time Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year A New York Times Editors' Choice ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST BOOKS: The Washington Post * The Financial Times * Slate * The Atlantic * Time * Forbes "[How Music Got Free] has the clear writing and brisk reportorial acumen of a Michael Lewis book."-Dwight Garner, The New York Times What happens when an entire generation commits the same crime? How Music Got Free is a riveting story of obsession, music, crime, and money, featuring visionaries and criminals, moguls and tech-savvy teenagers. It's about the greatest pirate in history, the most powerful executive in the music business, a revolutionary invention and an illegal website four times the size of the iTunes Music Store. Journalist Stephen Witt traces the secret history of digital music piracy, from the German audio engineers who invented the mp3, to a North Carolina compact-disc manufacturing plant where factory worker Dell Glover leaked nearly two thousand albums over the course of a decade, to the high-rises of midtown Manhattan where music executive Doug Morris cornered the global market on rap, and, finally, into the darkest recesses of the Internet. Through these interwoven narratives, Witt has written a thrilling book that depicts the moment in history when ordinary life became forever entwined with the world online-when, suddenly, all the music ever recorded was available for free. In the page-turning tradition of writers like Michael Lewis and Lawrence Wright, Witt's deeply reported first book introduces the unforgettable characters-inventors, executives, factory workers, and smugglers-who revolutionized an entire artform, and reveals for the first time the secret underworld of media pirates that transformed our digital lives. An irresistible never-before-told story of greed, cunning, genius, and deceit, How Music Got Free isn't just a story of the music industry-it's a must-read history of the Internet itself.

Author Stephen Witt brings a fresh, new voice to contemporary fiction with his new, offbeat novel American Moses. After an upstate New York town's only synagogue is burned down, devastated members of the small congregation stand in the smoldering ashes wondering what's next. The Rabbi vows to rebuild, but Southie Lewis, a secular Jew of very modest means, offers to lead whoever is willing to the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas-the county's most rapidly growing metropolis-a new Promised Land. To his surprise, a rag-tag bunch of fellow Jews sign on for the trip. So begins this interracial love story between Southie, a lifelong drifter, and Zippy, his Jamaican-American wife, who along with their two children, Coree and Billy, come up against the daunting mosaic of contemporary America, while struggling with their own lives. Written with bittersweet humor and a touch of tragedy, American Moses will make you laugh and cry while entertaining you every step of the way.

What links Taylor Swift to a factory worker? Kanye West to a German engineer? Beyonce 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

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.