Sonic Boom Paperback – August 15, 2002

I ordered this book when it was first released and it sat in a big pile of "future-reads" until months later. When I finally got around to picking it up I couldn't put it down. For someone who has closely followed the digital music revolution from the early days, it was more a trip down memory lane than anything but I definately learned some interesting tidbits along the way. Chronicling approximately a 4 year span of efforts from companies and characters from the pre-Napster days (Goodnoise and Liquid) to the post-Napster era (Gnutella and the peer-to-peer craze) and everything in between, this book is a quick and fun read. If you're into music and technology and have followed the bitter but inevitable marriage of the two, you'll enjoy this historical romp down memory lane.

The problem is that there are pages in this book that were accidentally cut and replaced with pages from a book about basketball.

A must-read book to know the contemporary music industry.

An excellent documentary of a tale that may initially conclude as the music industry's final straw with musicians and fans alike. Unfortunately, author John Alderman might have jumped the gun with timing the release of this book, because the war over 'all things MP3' is just now starting to heat up. With that being said, "Sonic Boom" is surely your best bet for research on music copyright and the conflict over its piracy. More importantly, however, this book explicitly warns the music industry about repeating mistakes of the past: ignoring technological advances, and the Internet's definite position in the future of music sales. It covers the twists and turns of the over-celebrated court case against Napster, while underlining how the collapse of traditional economics of the music industry was not completely inevitable. Alderman repeatedly returns to the notion that if different decisions had been made at particular moments, it might have been possible to preserve copyright within cyberspace. According to the author, the failure to create a virtual marketplace for selling music was a fatal error. Instead of using all their lobbying power and legal resources to attack the Net, the industry's corporate leaders should have been working out qualms in developing technologies, so that the fan and musician would prosper in today's rapid Internet growth. However, copyright laws were strengthened, Napster was prosecuted, and blocking software was developed to "kill" Peer2Peer sharing. Alderman argues that despite these triumphs, all these efforts only delay the inevitable.Good book, quick read, and definitely a few years ahead of its time. As legal action against copyright infringement and Peer2Peer sharing heats up ($17,000 settlements among colleges and their students), intelligence of John Alderman's caliber is as necessary today as it has ever been.

While slightly outdated (mid-2001), and displaying some typos as well as Alderman's slightly scatterbrained writing style, this short but effective book is a telling report on how the world of music distribution is experiencing a true upheaval. Unfortunately, nurtured by the free-for-all of the internet revolution, the expectation that all music should be free led to the free file sharing services. File sharing is certainly a great way to stick it to the big companies that have unapologetically ripped of musicians and consumers for decades. But the problem is that artists deserve to be compensated for their music, so free file sharing is not the answer. The rash of lawsuits by the big corporations proved that they only have their own profiteering at heart, and their insistence that they are fighting for artists' rights is a farce. The highlight of this book is an excellent quote from online music pioneer John Barlow to close chapter 1: "The greatest constraint on future liberties may not come from government but from corporate legal departments laboring to protect by force what can no longer be protected by practical efficiency or general social consent." That is the angle from which Alderman writes this book. The big labels, through lawsuits and intimidation, refuse to face the fact that they may be toppled by a revolution and have reacted like any fading strong-arm dictator. As soon as someone figures out how to properly compensate the artists, all fans and musicians, as well as culture in general, will benefit beyond comprehension. Alderman doesn't pretend to know the answer, and nobody does anyway, but this book proves aptly that something dramatic is happening in the world of music.

As the business of music distribution and consumption goes through a radical change, this is a good book for understanding how and why we got to where we are in the process. A good overview on the players, the technology and the legal and business issues involved. No one really knows where we are going from here in the music distribution business but this book lays out the history and issues so you can follow the fascinating developments.