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  • Sonic Boom: Napster, MP3, and the New Pioneers of Music
  • Susan Schmidt Horning (bio)
Sonic Boom: Napster, MP3, and the New Pioneers of Music. By John Alderman. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2001. Pp. xv+205. $17.

It has been said that ever since the invention of the first mechanical instrument, the hurdy-gurdy, the history of music has been about getting rid of the musicians. Perhaps one day it will be said that the history of recording was ultimately about getting rid of the record. Over the first century of sound recording, the technology used to record and reproduce music underwent one revolution after another, each time promising the consumer either improved sound quality or ease of use, while record companies reaped ever greater profits. Whereas new listening formats—from cylinder to shellac disk, vinyl LP, cassette and eight-track tape, compact disk—were introduced by the record industry, the latest revolution comes from consumers, bringing transformative consequences for musicians and composers, but mostly for the record companies that failed, or refused, to see it coming. By giving rise to the free trading of music over the Internet, digital compression technologies like MP3 have revolutionized the listening experience (not necessarily for the better) and undermined the importance not only of records but also of the empires built upon them.

In Sonic Boom, musician and media journalist John Alderman recounts the dramatic story of the on-line music revolution that has taken place since the 1990s, a tale of pioneers and pirates, technological foresight and corporate blindness, as new technologies gave rise to illegal music downloading. At the center of this story are the enthusiastic entrepreneurs and passionate techno-geeks who pioneered the software technologies, like MP3 and peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, that made music freely available to anyone with an Internet connection, and the record industry representatives who sought legal means to stem the flood of free music on-line. Ironically, earlier format changes had always brought improved quality of listening for the record buyer, at least up through the stereo LP. But the sonic quality of recordings arguably peaked at midcentury, and ever since then the introduction of new formats was simply a way for record companies to boost sales by encouraging consumers to purchase new versions of what they already owned. With Napster, the record companies finally met their nemesis: talented consumers who married their love of music and computer programming to create a new world of free music.

Rather than embrace this new means of music distribution and find a way to profit from it, record companies resisted and, via their collective representative, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), fought on-line music in the courts. They succeeded in putting Napster out of business, but not the Napster community—listeners, rippers, and downloaders who love music but not high-priced CDs. Alderman traces the beginning of this community back to Grateful Dead fans who recorded and traded, with [End Page 890] the band's blessing, cassettes of different concerts, each of which was unique because the Dead apparently never played it the same way twice. By allowing fans to bootleg their concerts the band only enhanced its popularity. That was the 1960s, however, and by the 1990s intellectual property laws like the Audio Home Recording Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act made such personal recording inconvenient if not impossible. Sonic Boom traces what happened in between, focusing on the 1990s, from one of the Worldwide Web's first start-ups, the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA), to the court battle between Napster and RIAA.

While this is neither a scholarly history nor an in-depth study of a particular technology, the narrative is detailed, fast-paced, and remarkably unbiased. Alderman is a reporter who carefully observed rapid and sweeping changes in the world of music; his book offers readers an inside view of a story that one day some historian may unravel. The chain of events, while not hard to follow, is convoluted and not easy to retrace; a glossary or cast of characters and a better index would have been a welcome addition. But as an account of recent events that...

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