Australia's First University Press

Stephen Richard Witt


A member of what he calls the 'pirate generation', Stephen Witt has been bootlegging music since the mid-1990s. While amassing an archive of hundreds of thousands of pirated mp3s, he became obsessed with the subject of digital piracy, and eventually changed careers to write this thrilling investigative history.He was born in New Hampshire in 1979, raised in the Midwest and graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in mathematics. He spent the next six years working for hedge funds in Chicago and New York. Following a spell in East Africa working in economic development, he graduated from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in 2011.He lives in Brooklyn, New York. How Music Got Free is his first book.

Books

Related News

Extract: Nation, Memory, Myth by Steve Vizard

Posted on 11 Jun 2025

How does myth generate meaning for a nation and its citizens? How does a national myth transform into symbolic performances of cultural memory and kinship?  

Extract: Beyond Green by Lesley Head

Posted on 11 Jun 2025

Culture, society and human behaviour have forever been linked to nature. In her thought-provoking book, Lesley Head, geographer and Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor Emeritus at…

Letter From the Publisher

Posted on

We started the year by moving tens of thousands of physical books across state lines, swam through oceans of metadata and updated our back-end systems…

Related Events

Dymocks Luncheon with Chris Hammer (NSW)

Fri 27 June at 12:00PM

Four Seasons Hotel, 199 George Street, Sydney NSW 2000

Join Chris Hammer in conversation with ABC's Fran Kelly to discuss the updated edition of The River.

Author Talk: Chris Hammer on The River (SA)

Thu 10 July at 6:30PM

Burnside Library, 401 Greenhill Road Tusmore, SA 5065

Learn more about author Chris Hammer's prize-winning non-fiction book about the Murray Darling Basin.