Author Stephen Witt searches for pirates in How Music Got Free!

They do it because they can — it’s the ideal adolescent mantra.

We’re talking about digital file-sharing here — or, in a less sanitized word, stealing. Of course, “sharing” sounds much more virtuous — warm and fuzzy, with a righteous Power to the People subtext — than stealing.

Despite legal downloading services like iTunes (which takes a 30-per-cent commission) and streaming services like Spotify (which pay notoriously little in royalties to the artist), the fact remains that close to half of music acquired online — 45 per cent — is through illegal file-sharing.

Hackers are seen as the Robin Hoods of our day. Steal from the rich to give to the pampered youth.

“Music piracy became to the late ’90s what drug experimentation was to the late ’60s: a generation-wide flouting of both social norms and the existing body of law, with little thought of consequences,” Stephen Witt writes in the recent fascinating but fatally flawed book How Music Got Free, dramatically subtitled The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy.

Well, not really. If anything, ’60s drug use expanded the market for what was then countercultural music, making the music biz the most lucrative of all entertainment industries. But the MP3 and streaming revolutions have diminished the opportunities to make real money from recordings.

Artists’ royalties have gone down the toilet. The obliviousness to their profit margin by millennials engaged in a mass culture of theft is now instinctual.

When Apple recently introduced a three-month trial of its streaming service Apple Music, the mega-corporation-with-a-conscience announced it wouldn’t be paying royalties during that period. Oops! Immediately, Taylor Swift — who last year famously removed her product from Spotify because of the service’s pitiful royalty rate — called Apple’s policy “shocking, disappointing and completely unlike this historically progressive company. … We don’t ask you for free iPhones. Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.” She added that she was speaking on behalf of other acts who were afraid to do so themselves. Apple immediately reversed course.

Last week, Neil Young became yet another artist to remove his work from streaming services; his major complaint is lousy sound quality. Yet consumers whose biggest triumph is getting free stuff are hardly expected to quibble about sound quality.

Witt begins his tome, surely the year’s most crucial music-industry book, in this way: “I am a member of the pirate generation. When I arrived at college in 1997, I had never heard of an MP3. … By 2005, when I moved to New York, I had collected 1,500 gigabytes of music, nearly 15,000 albums worth. … If you ordered the songs alphabetically by artist, you’d have to listen for a year and a half to get from ABBA to ZZ Top.

“I haven’t purchased an album with my own money since the turn of the millennium. … Most of this music I never listened to. I actually hated ABBA and although I owned four ZZ Top albums, I couldn’t tell you the name of one.

“What was really driving me, I wonder?”

Witt writes that “the piracy underground … wasn’t just a way to get the music; it was its own subculture.” Piracy by its very nature is transgressive, a middle finger to the system. Cool. Hip. The thing to do.

Besides, the big companies have always found nefarious ways to deny musicians royalties on outrageously price-inflated CDs, so file sharing is the listener’s revenge, right? And everybody knows that you make more money on touring these days.

Well, not quite: only the big groups, with big money (and big sponsorships) to support their lumbering infrastructure, rake in the big bucks. Call them the one per cent.

“We’ve given up a lot of rights to a sort of centralized authority that tells us what we can and can’t have on our phones,” Witt high-mindedly but vaguely said in an interview with Vice. “Maybe it had to happen that way, but it is a significant limitation on our freedom. I wanted people to think critically about that. I don’t have the answers. I just knew that a lot of this information (about the birth of MP3s) had never appeared anywhere.”

Witt’s history revolves around three central characters, and here the book is a kind of revelatory detective story. Karlheinz Brandenburg is a German scientist who discovered there are sounds the human ear cannot hear and set about compressing music at a rate where the files would be small enough to fit in a hand-held device. Doug Morris is a longtime record man who reigned over Universal, the world’s largest music company, during the heyday of the compact disc, milking the cheaply produced CDs while ignoring the advent of the MP3. Dell Glover packaged CDs at the PolyGram label’s manufacturing plant in North Carolina. Eventually he slipped out with a disc, copied it and sold a few copies to friends and locals near his hometown of Shelby, weeks ahead of release dates.

The story conflates from there, with Glover growing more audacious (he hid CDs behind his large belt buckle) and industry mavens like Morris haplessly in pursuit.

As Witt told Vice, he didn’t think piracy’s effect on artists merited much coverage in How Music Got Free: “There’s no shortage of how the musicians feel or think about things. Musicians are also always creative types first. They will always be beholden to songwriting, their talent as producers, or their ability to play. So, in my opinion, that meant they didn’t necessarily fit with the book.”

How cavalier! Any financial analysis of file sharing demands that lost revenues by the artists be included, if only because illegal downloaders must have “content” to steal and share. What if Witt’s book surreptitiously appeared for free on Kindle?

“Music must be free” became a hippie-like mantra, like freedom of speech. And if information must be free, then surely Witt’s misguided book should be offered free of charge, oblivious to his many hours of painstaking research.