Net price of free music

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Many people quote the cyber guru Stewart Brand's famous rallying call: "Information wants to be free." They hardly ever remember that he added: "It also wants to be very expensive." But that's the nub of the matter. Data that is free in the sense of being freely available isn't necessarily free in the sense of having no price tag; and vice versa. The easier it is to reproduce and communicate information, the more urgent and difficult becomes the tension between the two kinds of freedom that it "wants".

For a gloriously unlikely 18-month period between the autumn of 1999 and the spring of 2001, Napster made music free in both senses at the same time.

As some 30 million users around the world discovered, all you had to do was to fire up the neat little Napster application on your computer, and you got access to a universal jukebox that never needed feeding with coins. While online schemes promoted by the record companies offered you limited menus of recent hits, Napster let all the users share each others' record collections. It wasn't B2C - business to consumer - but P2P - peer to peer. At a stroke, it mobilised the internet's overwhelming advantage over any real-world distribution mechanism: its comprehensiveness. What you found on Napster was as idiosyncratic, as diverse, as the combined tastes of 30 million people could make it.

John Alderman gets my own Napster-use (for example) dead right, when he talks in this book about people going online to "uncover songs from years-old memories". I retrieved every track I half-remembered from the late Seventies and early Eighties: minor songs by Elvis Costello, Clash B-sides, recherche reggae. At the same time, though, I knew people who used it to collect medieval Christmas carols performed on authentic early instruments; and in a baking desert in central Iran, under the rock-hewn tomb of the Emperor Xerxes, I once met an Iranian student who was using it to explore the works of a band from Liverpool he called "the Peatles".

It was intoxicating; but a technology that simply ignored the issue of how information should be priced was always going to run into trouble.

This book chronicles the efforts of the music industry to keep up with the development of the internet, and to make "free" mean something compatible with copyright-protection, from the first definition of the MP3 file format back in 1987 to this year's successful court order to shut Napster down.

Alderman sees a succession of stages. To begin with, the five giant corporations dominating recorded music - Sony, EMI, Vivendi/Universal, Bertelsmann and Time Warner - simply failed to take in the net's potential to outflank their cherished distribution systems. While the decentralised, packet-switched world grew under their noses, and Wired magazine announced the death of copyright, the companies projected a future just like the past.

Alderman compares them to a train overtaken by a host of speeding cars.

Then the arrival of Napster burst everything open, forcing a general rethink from first principles about who owed what to whom when music was consumed. Now, with Napster effectively out of the way, the companies must work out how to reconcile the convenience it offered with the protection of their, and artists', intellectual property.

Sonic Boom is a valuable instant history, teasing out the twists and turns of the struggle over "free" music. It reports and understands the passions that were aroused, without being sucked into them in a way that would turn the story into an unhelpful morality tale. The inventors of Gnutella, an alternative P2P application, described themselves as "legitimate nihilistic media terrorists", while on the other side of the fence, Eminem declared: "Whoever put my s**t on the internet, I want to meet that motherf***er and beat the s**t out of him." Alderman sees all sides of the argument, and passes judgment only in little flicks of irony.

There's unlikely to be a better tool than this book for understanding what's been going on.