Did free downloads lead to the death of the music industry?

Stephen Witt has documented how a generation came to expect all their music for free, writes Eoghan O’Sullivan.

What happens when an entire generation commits the same crime?

That’s the question posed by Stephen Witt’s book, How Music Got Free. Witt declares in the introduction that he is a member of the pirate generation, collecting over 100,000 mp3s — nearly 15,000 albums worth — on 1,500 gigabytes of music.