Beyond the Charts: MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution.(Review)

Bruce Haring: Beyond the Charts: MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution

Softcover, 2000, ISBN 0-9674517-0-1, 174 pages, illustrated, index; OTC Press, 6363 Sunset Boulevard, 7th floor, Los Angeles, California 90028, USA; World Wide Web www.OFFtheCHARTS.com

Bruce Haring's Beyond the Charts: MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution is a sequel to his Non-Fiction Book of the Year (1997), Off the Charts: Ruthless Days and Reckless Nights Inside the Music Industry. Where the latter book attacks the immense control exerted over music by the marketing mechanisms of giant corporations, Beyond the Charts cuts to the bone of the music industry by criticizing the record companies for hiding in the bushes and thus ignoring the dangers of digital distribution of music through the Internet.

A striking example pointed out by Mr. Haring is the record companies' employment of semi-retired policemen to enforce copyright by raiding street vendors selling pirated copies while computer geeks were already distributing music from "bedroom to bedroom" over the Internet. When the recording industry finally got its act together to attempt to legally define and reinforce copyright for World Wide Web distribution, it was, according to the author, already too late!

But this is not Mr. Haring's only compelling revelation about the record industry's reluctance to enter the digital age. And if you need to catch up on the digital revolution of music distribution and find out why the technical achievement of compressing sound files still has not led to the wide availability of music online, this book is definitely worth both the money and the time.

Through interviews and "soft" technical explanations of the bits and bytes of digital sound and the history of music distribution, Mr. Haring makes a convincing case that MP3 in its many manifestations is here to stay. The book lays out the problems, pointing out that the record companies have hitherto always had the final say in the development and distribution of music playback hardware. One example is the jump from vinyl to compact discs, in which the battle was fought mainly between Sony and Philips.

In a more philosophical vein, Mr. Haring brings in the voice of John Perry Barlow (co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and lyricist for The Grateful Dead) who, at the MP3 Summit '99, quoted Thomas Jefferson's definition of intellectual property, that an idea can be infinitely propagated, whereas any tangible medium employed for its transmission can be copyrighted and submitted to controlled distribution. Whoever is in control of producing and distributing this medium is in possession of its value. Thus, the author tells the story of a bunch of innovative programmers who, from their respective bedrooms, developed software which, by means of a rapidly evolving infrastructure, could transfer music independently of any medium controlled by the record companies. The recording industry's know-how about the recording and marketing of music is elaborated in a longish preface in which the issue of digital music is presented as a matter of a few companies' control over the market, the artist, and hence the consumer. Mr. Haring's elegiac soliloquy echoes the famous ideas of the late Frankfurt School in which commercial interest was seen as the antidote to artistic freedom and therefore creativity.