Book: Sonic Boom

Author: John Alderman
I've just finished reading Sonic Boom: Napster, MP3 and the new Pioneers of music It is about the history of digital music from its infancy in the early 90s to the explosion of popularity of MP3 in 2000. This book does a good job covering almost everything in that decade from the most well-known companies like MP3.com, Real Network, and of course Napster, to the lesser-known ones, like Liquid Audio, Listen.com, Internet Underground Music Archive, Riffage.com, Nullsoft (the maker of Winamp, which is certainly more famous than the company itself) It ends with the ruling on the Napster case, which effectively shutdown the 1st generation Peer-to-peer music file sharing service.

I consider myself a close follower of the development of digital music and thus have a pretty good idea about what these major players did. However, this book went into much deeper levels of details about the stories and people behind the companies. A very interesting read I must say.

After reading this book, which was published in 2001 (that's why I picked it up dirt cheap at a discount bookstore,) the first thing came to my mind was that it would have a very interesting sequel, with developments after 2001, covering Apple's iPod and iTunes Music Store, Rhapsody (a music streaming service offered by Listen.com and later sold to Real Networks along with the company), the 2nd incarnation of Napster (the name was bought by Roxio, which sold off its software business, best known for its CD-burning software, and renamed itself to Napster!) and the Grokster ruling (the highest-profile case against P2P company after Napster)

Readers of this book would all agree that there is no way record companies could turn back the clock and go against the digital music revolution. Looks like some record companies are slowly but finally getting it. Here is a sign: Warner Music developing e-label