"Beyond the Charts"

Bruce Haring sets out to tell the amazing story of how the MP3 movement turned the recording industry on its head, but misses the beat.

By Janelle Brown

Mar 23, 2000 | Of all the paradigm-shifting sagas that have emerged in the past few years, the MP3 movement is one of the most interesting. Here we have an innocuous little music format that has launched a hundred lawsuits, buoyed little-known musicians into stardom, made music-loving geeks into millionaires and turned one of the most lucrative industries in America on its head.

The rise of MP3 is a story that should make a terrific book -- a chance to show the impact this movement could have on issues like freedom of speech, notions of ownership and copyright, artist empowerment and the decentralization of power in the music industry. So when I heard about the new title by USA Today high-tech reporter Bruce Haring, called "Beyond the Charts," -- the first book to attempt to document the ongoing drama of the MP3 movement -- I couldn't wait to read it.

Unfortunately, this isn't that book. There is a certain futility in trying to document a movement that is still history in the making, and if one thing is certain, the fallout of the "MP3 revolution" is barely getting started. But while other authors have cleared this hurdle -- books are written about the Internet all the time -- Haring doesn't get beyond the frantic pace of the facts and into the more thoughtful realm of ideas.

At a brief 165 pages -- of which fully 22 pages are a reprint of a speech by Electric Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow -- "Beyond the Charts" feels more like an extended essay than a book. In fact, it reads most like an especially long version of a newspaper article: a kind of added-value collection of the features you might have already seen in the countless publications that cover the MP3 movement. If you're looking for facts about what's happened so far, this is the book for you. If you're looking for deep insights, though, keep waiting -- Haring has few.

"Beyond the Charts" opens with a gleeful Michael Robertson, CEO of MP3.com, landing an $11 million round of financing, and closes with the MP3 Summit of the summer of 1999. In between, Haring documents the rise of the music format that materialized in 1997, sparked the imaginations of impoverished music fans around the world and has caused the record industry headaches ever since.

By focusing primarily on the major players and seminal moments -- from the invention of the MP3 technology, to the creation of SDMI, to the IUMA's first downloadable tunes, to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) lawsuit against Diamond Multimedia and its Rio MP3 player, and pretty much every battle waged by the RIAA -- the book will at least satisfy the cravings of those who want an account of every twist and turn of the MP3 movement.

Next Page: We learn about Michael Robertson's six-CD collection, but not much else

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