From stealing to Spotify: the story behind how music got free
A two-part docuseries looks back at the history of piracy and how the music industry found itself in such a precarious place
March 2024
‘The internet is an alien life form’: how David Bowie created a market for digital music
Bowie’s 1999 album Hours… was the first to go on sale online before hitting regular stores – and his experimentation caused horror in the music industry
August 2022
I was a teenage Napster obsessive – and illegal downloading changed my music taste for good
Emma Garland
The P2P giant was shut down 20 years ago this week. But the omnivorous mindset it encouraged in a generation resonates in the very best of today’s genre-smashing pop
August 2020
'You've been smoking too much!': the chaos of Tony Wilson's digital music revolution
The Factory impresario’s company Music33 sold individual songs as MP3s three years before Apple. But with a baffling interface and dial-up connections he was doomed
July 2018
National Album Day: celebrating nothing but a revenue opportunity
Michael Hann
Online distribution, invented by the music industry, killed the album. But now the industry is asking us to cough up
May 2018
Names in the news
Chance discoveries are music to DJ Julie Adenuga’s ears
Rebecca Nicholson
Spotify trends could help us gauge the public mood – Bank of England
May 2017
Britain's most popular recording artist in 2016? David Bowie
The artist, who died in January 2016 after releasing his album Blackstar, sold more music than chart-toppers Adele and Drake
March 2017
Music blog
There's a great singles chart out there – it's just not the one we use as the Top 40
Michael Hann
The Official Charts Company’s physical singles chart, based on CD and vinyl sales, paints a very different picture to the ‘real’ Top 40 – and a much more attractive one
December 2016
Tables turned as vinyl sales overtake digital sales for first time in UK
Records sales hit £2.5m last week compared with £2.1m for digital, with surge partly attributable to Christmas gift buying
May 2016
Datablog
Bigger than Waterloo: the internet's favourite Eurovision winners
More than four decades after its release, Abba’s hit is one of the most frequently downloaded of all Eurovision-winning songs. So what makes a winner a commercial hit too?
February 2016
Africa's first music download service launches in Senegal
Youssou N’dour and Baaba Maal are among almost 200 artists who have signed up to MusikBi, which promises to promote and pay African musicians
January 2016
Music streaming doubles in US, while Adele carries torch for physical sales
US music streams rise from 164.5bn to 317.2bn over past year, but most sales of British singer’s 7.44m-selling album were in CD format
November 2015
Adele's new single breaks record for first week download sales
Hello sold 1.1m downloads within seven days of release on 23 October, and also broke records on music video site Vevo
June 2015
Book of the day
How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt review – gleeful gonzo tour of an industry’s reckoning
A brilliantly written book shows that it wasn’t file-sharing that brought the music industry to its knees, but an organised criminal conspiracy
May 2015
How the compact disc lost its shine
It’s 30 years since Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms began the CD boom. How did the revolution in music formats come about and what killed it?
April 2015
The suspense! The slaughter! What we learned from the download chart
Jay Z's Tidal app falls out of iPhone top 700 chart
Streaming helps digital music match global physical sales
Joe Hockey moves to add GST to music, movie and game downloads
