Technically Speaking

Beyond the Charts: MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution

JM Northern Media, 174 pp., $19.95

For as long as the recording industry has been an "industry," it has protested new technological innovations, claiming to champion its artists and their intellectual property rights against the intrusions of copyright infringers. Starting with the player piano in the early 1900s, and continuing through the era of tape recorders, CDs, and online music distribution, the music industry has a long and consistent history of resisting technological change. Only in the last 20 years, however, has the industry gained the ability to lobby Congress, challenge innovators in the courtroom, and control what sort of products make it onto store shelves -- and what kind never make it past conception.

It will probably be another decade, at least, before we understand the implications of technologies like MP3, a digital compression technique that shrinks sound files for easy online distribution, for the music industry and copyright law. But that hasn't stopped hyperbolic high-tech reporters, who smell another "revolution" with every new press release and IPO, from speculating on the effects of the "digital revolution." Which, incidentally, is the subtitle of a new book by USA Today reporter Bruce Haring called Beyond the Charts, which traces the history of music technology from the clunky digital recordings of the 1980s to MP3s, file-sharing techniques, and beyond.

It's an ambitious concept, but the book -- which reads, true to Haring's background, like a lengthy newspaper feature -- is too disorganized and too early to really do its subject justice: It's a history, in short, without a conclusion. Like most newspaper reporters, Haring's style is to flit around from year to year and from subject to subject. It's a style that may have served Haring well in his work for USA Today, but without a timeline or clear organizational strategy, the book drifts where it should charge forward.

That isn't to say, however, that Beyond the Charts isn't worth a read; it is, if only because it's a relatively painless introduction to a topic many lay readers may be intimidated to explore. Haring explores his subject broadly, but with sufficient depth; his topics include the many piracy lawsuits filed in the past two decades by the Recording Industry Association of America, the industry's main lobbying arm; the development of standards for audiotapes, CDs, and digital compression; the various arguments made by supporters and opponents of digital music distribution; and the history of copyright law, from paper texts to downloadable music. The book is also full of interesting facts from the recent but forgotten past; who remembers, for example, that CD burners used to cost $500, or that the first commercially available CD was Billy Joel's 52nd St., released in Japan on Oct. 1, 1982?

It's clear where Haring's sympathies lie: The book, in fact, is introduced by rapper/producer Dr. Dre, one of the leading proponents of free online music distribution. But this introduction to digital music, though clunky and poorly organized at times, manages to stay objective enough for readers to draw their own conclusions. Beyond the Charts won't be the last (or the best) book about MP3s, but it's a broad, if occasionally clumsy, introduction. Multimedia