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In Sonic Boom, cyberjournalist John Alderman recalls a crucial moment in rock history when a band of young upstarts called the Rolling Stones first set foot in the Chicago studio of Chess Records, the label home of various blues legends who helped form the Stones' sound. To their amazement, they found themselves in the formidable presence of bluesman Muddy Waters. But he wasn't there as a creative consultant, a CEO, or a musical impresario. It just so happened that the Stones' visit coincided with the day a decidedly unwealthy Muddy Waters showed up to paint the studio roof. Keith Richards summed up the irony effectively: "Welcome to the music business!"

To be fair, Muddy Waters would gain an income through his music, not least from those record buyers who would begin with the Stones and work their way back to the Delta. And without the promotion, distribution, and recording facilities of Chess Records, his music might have never made its way across the Atlantic to the impressionable ears of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in the first place. Nevertheless, the history of recorded music is a boulevard of broken dreams. Many artists struggle to make ends meet and die broke, even as royalties from their music enrich the canny copyright-holders. As Herbie Hancock puts it in the preface to Sonic Boom, "For the hard work involved in being a middleman, the label is certainly entitled to a decent profit. But not a killing. To make huge amounts of money on the backs of artists who are not fairly compensated sours the relationship and creates bad will that lasts a long time."

With the discussion generated by the Napster phenomenon and the efforts of the Recording Industry Association of America to protect what is now a $15 billion-a-year enterprise, a new awareness is gradually developing among the listening/buying public concerning the small percentage allotted the artist in the sale of a compact disc as well as the millions spent in anticipating and, to a large degree, manipulating the desires of the buyer. This allows progressive young people to feel righteous even as they download thousands of dollars' worth of music for free. (Nonprogressive kids couldn't care less who is or isn't making money on the deal.) By doing so, you see, they're punishing the exploitative conglomerates who dominate the recording industry.

The irony isn't lost on the artists, but they are by no means of one mind when they contemplate what Napster hath wrought. Some see the change as ultimately for the best, despite the immediate loss of royalties. With the increasing availability of music on the Internet, the listener is now peculiarly free to cultivate category-defying listening habits while discovering and, ideally, supporting artists whose work and sales owe nothing to corporate market research.

A service like Napster (and sites like Morpheus, Aimster, and KaZaa, which have quickly formed to take its place) affords music seekers a selection of unprecedented eclecticism, while sites dedicated to particular artists and genres provide avenues of conversation, recommendations, and issues which only have a tangential relation to the music itself. Cynics might suggest that this blessed situation can only continue until the Internet meets the fate of commercial radio and degenerates into a pure marketing tool, but a visit to any number of message boards, sustained by nothing so much as the committed enthusiasms of various subcultures, suggests that something a little more hopeful is going on.

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