Born in 1974, Stephen Witt is a member of what he calls "the pirate generation": a group for whom the illegal acquisition of music became, in the late 1990s, "what drug experimentation was to the late 1960s; a generation-wide flouting of both social norms and the existing body of law, with little thought of consequences". When he went to the University of Chicago in 1997 he had never heard of an MP3, but by the end of the first term he had been seduced by the "perverse lure of the underground" and used the format to build a library of more than 100 tracks. By 2005 he had filled his digital swag bag with 15000 albums' worth of music. Many of his peers were doing the same thing.It was only after signing up to a journalism course at Columbia in 2011 that Witt began thinking about the story behind those stolen songs. He had assumed - hadn't we all? - that they came from a vast and scattered global community of dorm-room downloaders like himself.He discovered that just one guy - a shrink wrapper at Polygram's North Carolina CD Manufacturing Plant - was responsible for stealing and uploading 1500 CDs before their official release. Witt estimates that, by smuggling discs out of the plant, Bernie Lydell Glover cost the music industry $21-billion over eight years.After serving a three-month sentence in 2010, "the most fearsome digital pirate of them all" is now a regular churchgoer, raising his family and working at a truck factory. Remarkably, nobody had approached him for an interview before, so Witt gets the full scoop.By 1996 Glover was living in a trailer behind his parents' house, trying to make a few bucks breeding pit bulls. "His girlfriend was unhappy, his tattoos were stupid and he was driving himself into debt," says Witt. Then a friend showed him a file-sharing site: Rabid Neurosis was a community for people (mostly young men) whose goal was to be ahead of the curve - sharing pre-release films, music and games.Though RNS had a not-for-profit ethos, Glover traded his pilfered albums for films, which he then ripped to disc and sold around town, making $1500 in a good week.Eventually he ran a site for trusted clients, giving access to all his stolen material for a monthly $20 subscription.His low-level crime had a massive impact on the music industry, which was sending albums by artists such as Eminem to the plant handcuffed to security guards, only for Glover's crew to walk out the back door with them, forcing release dates to be rushed forward.Rap was particularly popular with the pirates. You can see why downloaders might not have been too troubled about stealing from guys loaded with jewellery who bragged about criminality on a more violent level. Piracy skewed sales in favour of certain genres: James Blunt-loving soccer moms bought discs while Eminem fans were more likely to rip free files.Witt tells Glover's tale alongside that of the MP3 inventor Karlheinz Brandenburg and that of the world's most successful music executive, Doug Morris, as he battles the pirates. Witt's sharp prose and pace grips through even the potentially tedious tales of patenting and corporate ledgers. His narrative hurtles like a thriller towards iTunes and the profit shift from recorded to live music. It is - in both senses - a ripping yarn.How Music Got Free (Bodley Head) R285..