How Music Got Free: Release date, trailer & everything to know about the Eminem-produced docuseries 

The wait for the Eminem-produced docuseries How Music Got Free has come to an end with Paramount+ announcing the movie’s release date. The two-part docuseries is all set to release on June 11, 2024.

It will be available for viewers in the U.S., and Canada on June 11, and on June 12, 2024, in the U.K., Australia, France, Italy, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. The trailer of How Music Got Free was released on IMDb and the Paramount+ YouTube channel on May 21, 2024.

The docuseries is produced by Warner Bros and comprises Paul Rosenberg, Steve Stoute, Maverick Carter, and LeBron James as executive producers. It showcases the era of the 90s when the FBI launched an investigation into music piracy to convict those involved in stealing music.

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How Music Got Free is an inside story of the technology disruption that altered music: More details explored

According to the description of How Music Got Free's trailer on the Paramount+ YouTube channel, the docuseries features the “quirky genius” of the music pirates, the FBI investigations, convictions, and the accounts of big-time music artists and executives. The description states the docuseries is:

“An unbelievable story of cunning, illegality, celebrity, and innovation, these are the events that changed the music industry forever. Narrated by Method Man, the series features interviews with Eminem, 50 Cent, Timbaland, Jimmy Iovine, Rocsi Diaz, Rhymefest, Steve Stoute and more.”

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the docuseries is a fascinating and funny inside story of the technology-driven disruption that altered the music arena during the late ‘90s to early 2000s.

The one-minute fifty-four-second trailer of How Music Got Free opens with Eminem talking about when Napster— a peer-to-peer audio distribution platform— came along. The rapper mentioned that he didn't understand the internet at the time and thought that Yahoo! was a person.

The trailer of the docuseries showcases the boom of the music CD business and the advent of file-sharing technology. It mentions that all the work that went into writing, tweaking, and recording the song was prone to getting leaked. Moreover, the trailer also shows how music was pirated by taking CD copies out in food trays and belt buckles.

How Music Got Free is directed by Alexandria Stapleton and is based on the 2015 book of the same name, written by journalist Stephen Witt. Talking about the docuseries in an interview with Screen Rant dated March 2024, director Stapleton mentioned:

"What lessons can we learn from the past to embrace technology before it's too late, and it just gets totally disrupted, and you and it burns all down, and you have to rebuild?"

Additionally, in her interview with The Hollywood Reporter dated May 2024, Alexandria Stapleton described How Music Got Free as a story that proves how brilliant minds can be found in unlikely places like the "forgotten factory town of Shelby, North Carolina."

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Executive producer Eminem has been vocal about despising music piracy for a long time. In an interview covered by Hip Hop Dx dated October 2002, Eminem stated:

“I’m sorry; when I worked 9-to-5, I expected to get a paycheck every week. It’s the same with music; if I’m putting my heart and all my time into music, I expect to get rewarded for that."

He also mentioned that he works very hard and if anyone could download his music for free it would kill the "whole purpose of making music."