This series is written from published material and its byline claims method rather than credentials, so the sources are listed. They are given as books and categories of material rather than as page citations; where a claim in the text is contested, the text says so at the point of the claim.
This volume has an unusual problem before the list. The blog era documented itself continuously, in public, at enormous length, and most of that documentation is gone. Blogs were hosted on services that closed, on domains that lapsed, with audio files on hosts that deleted them. The web archives caught some of it and not most of it. A great deal of what this book describes was written down by thousands of people and is no longer readable by anybody, which is a strange thing to have to say about a decade inside living memory, and it means the surviving accounts are disproportionately the ones that were later collected into books by people with publishers.
On the New York scene. Meet Me in the Bathroom by Lizzy Goodman is the standard account: a book of interviews with the participants, gathered roughly a decade after the events. It is detailed, candid and shaped by the fact that everybody in it knew they were being recorded for the record. This book leans on it with that caution stated.
On the independent labels and the inherited infrastructure. Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad, published in 2001, documents the 1980s American underground whose circuit and ethics the bands in this volume inherited; it is the prehistory of the archipelago chapter. Our Noise, John Cook’s history of Merge Records written with the label’s founders, is the best available account of how one of these labels actually worked, including its terms with artists, and, being an authorised history, it is the label’s own version.
On the technology and the piracy. How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt is the standard narrative account of the MP3’s development, the leak economy and the file-sharing decade, and it is unusually good on the physical and human mechanics of how records actually escaped before release. The technical description of perceptual coding in the chapter on the copy that cost nothing is standard signal-processing material and can be checked in any audio engineering text.
On the litigation. The Napster judgments of 2000 and 2001 and the LimeWire judgment of 2010 are public court records. The industry’s campaign of suits against individual users is documented in contemporary reporting and in the trade body’s own statements.
On the industry’s numbers. Global recorded-music revenue figures come from the IFPI’s published annual reporting, and American shipment data from the RIAA. Both are trade bodies reporting on their own members’ businesses. The direction and rough magnitude are not disputed by anyone; the framing is theirs and is noted where it matters.
On the long tail argument. Chris Anderson’s article of 2004 and the subsequent book set out the optimistic case. The empirical rebuttal that this book relies on is Anita Elberse’s analysis published in the Harvard Business Review in 2008; further work since has broadly supported the concentration finding. Herbert Simon’s formulation of the attention problem dates to 1971 and is widely reprinted.
On rockism, poptimism and the shape of the criticism. Kelefa Sanneh’s essay in the New York Times in 2004 is the document that put the argument in front of the whole field. Jessica Hopper’s collected criticism, published in 2015, is both a source and, in its title, a finding. A number of writers who worked in the era’s blogs and magazines have since written frankly about its blind spots, and this book has relied on those accounts rather than on its own inference wherever it could.
On the contracts and the arithmetic. The mechanics in Movement Four (recoupment, dealer price, packaging and free-goods deductions, producer points, 360 structures, the two copyrights, mechanical and performance royalties) are standard industry practice and are set out most clearly in All You Need to Know About the Music Business by Donald Passman. Every figure in Movement Four is an illustrative shape, not an audited number from any particular contract, and the text says so at each point. The actual agreements are private and this book has not seen them.
On the royalty statements that were published. Several musicians of the period made their own statements public. Those documents are real and their arithmetic is checkable; each reflects one particular contract, and this book has used them to establish that the gap between prominence and income was very large rather than to derive a general rate.
On the records. Release dates, chart positions, label affiliations and personnel are from the standard chart archives and from the releases themselves. Where a sales figure is a label claim rather than an audited number, the text says so.
On individual artists’ accounts. Where this book reports what somebody said about their own life (the cabin, the leaving of a label, the experience of a hype cycle) it is attributed to them in the sentence, and readers should go to the interviews and memoirs themselves rather than to this summary of them.
Where figures are disputed (what any pay-what-you-want experiment actually averaged, what any particular multiple-rights deal was really worth, how much of the revenue collapse file-sharing caused) the text says so rather than choosing. Those disagreements are not gaps in the record. They are the record.
