Every day, hundreds of millions of people all over the world experience music via digital files that use an audio coding format known as MP3. As Jonathan Sterne reveals in this comprehensive book, the name was chosen with an eye to marketing. After all, ‘MP3’ is rather more catchy than the original name for the format, ‘MPEG-1 audio layer 3’ (202). You might have some vague idea of what MP3 means. You might have heard stories about how Suzanne Vega's song ‘Tom's Diner’ played a role in the testing for the format. And you will certainly be familiar with the idea that MP3s played a major part in some seismic changes in the business of music, involving piracy and lots of newspaper articles about struggling record companies. Jonathan Sterne's book will tell you all you need to know about this extraordinary format, first codified in 1992 and widely adopted from about 1998 onwards, and its seemingly remarkable effects.

MP3: The Meaning of a Format does a great deal more too. In fact, for some readers, it will probably provide a bit too much information and theory about other things. It's just over half way through the main text of the book (131 pages out of 240) that we get to what became known as the MP3, when we arrive in Hanover, Germany, for a meeting of a group of digital audio experts, as part of a conference of a newly established standards body, the Moving Pictures Expert Group. That's what those four letters MPEG stand for. (Strangely, the MP in MP3 means Moving Pictures, even though the MP3 is an audio format; the 3 means ‘layer 3’ – the third of the three standards approved by the Group.) The 130 pages leading up to that 1988 meeting comprise a long and weighty introduction, and three historical chapters that explore the development of the ‘perceptual coding’ and ‘masking’ technologies that enabled the audio coding that underpins MP3. This section of the book involves a long journey into telephonic research at AT&T's Bell Labs in the 1920s, an account of the development of information theory, discussions of hearing aids, experiments on cats, changing views of the concept of ‘noise’, and the history of the scientific field of psychoacoustics. Some of this is relevant to music. We learn, for example, that there was a shift from an ideological privileging of speech in hearing research to a greater prominence for music at about the same time as greater computing power and a new utopianism about computers as a potential basis for human emancipation. But in some ways Sterne's book might just as well have been called A Sound-Based Genealogy of Digital Media, or even A History of Audio Compression, compression referring here to the way in which data is reduced in order to achieve efficiencies of transmission and storage. It's all rather brilliant. What, though, might researchers and students of music gain from reading this book, and from persisting through a first half which is clearly rooted in ‘sound studies’, that interdisciplinary field that seeks to counter the marginalization of audition in the social sciences and humanities?

One thing that patient readers with a primary interest in music will gain is an encounter with sound studies at its very best. Sterne provides insight into the remarkable scientific developments that lay behind a whole set of cultural artefacts and experiences (telephony, hearing aids, and CDs, to name but some). It is a rich and elegantly written cultural history. Even when we get to MP3 itself, many of the most interesting aspects of the story concern the vagaries of business history in the realm of science and technology. Sterne compellingly explains how MP3 became one of the most famous formats of our era (by 1999, it had apparently outstripped even pornography as the most-used search term on the internet). The format won out over the other two ‘layers’ or audio formats recognized by the Moving Pictures Expert Group, notably layer 2, which was supported by a much stronger coalition of corporations, principally Philips and Panasonic, and which had initially achieved greater success. Sterne shows that success was achieved via a mixture of contingency, accident, and opportunity. Layer 3 was developed mainly by the then comparatively obscure Fraunhofer Society, a non-profit organization that receives considerable German federal and Länder funds. An Australian hacker cracked a program that Fraunhofer had made available in order to disseminate its own layer 3 format. This cracked code was then taken up by the nascent cultures of internet music because of its higher quality at lower bitrates and smaller file sizes, and because it was free to use. Due to its take-up in these worlds of internet-based musical exchange, the computer industry then started to package MP3-based software with their machines. The remarkable domination of the format has earned Fraunhofer and its partners hundreds of millions of dollars in licensing fees over the years.

Yet it would be wrong to think that Sterne provides merely a geeky version of business history. There is original insight here into the strange and distinctive ‘materiality’ of MP3s, and this is where the pay-off for music studies readers starts to become apparent. Sterne shows how MP3s make music much more ‘ready-to-hand’ (the phrase is derived from Heidegger's philosophy of ‘things’) than any previous technology (193). He takes us beyond audiophile bleating about low sound quality, beyond ridiculous claims that digitalization will democratize music making by decoupling music and capitalism, and beyond the idea that digital music represents a new stage in the commodification of culture via new surveillance and marketing possibilities. For Sterne, in spite of the origins of the MP3 format in efforts by large companies to maximize profit and extend commodification, it ‘offers large numbers of people an opportunity to bring the arts nearer to them . . . The social character of distance between music and its listener is now an open question for the first time since prestige records began to erode elite and popular disdain for recorded music’ (221).

Sterne demonstrates that any understanding of music, power, and meaning in the modern world needs to consider not only the music industry in the sense that the term has too often been used – as synonymous with ‘the recording industry’ (large and independent companies that commission and promote recordings by contracted musicians); as he puts it, ‘A real social critique of music markets must extend beyond the usually named music industries, to broadband, consumer electronics, computers and software, and a range of other related fields’ (218). I’ve been trying to make something like that argument for years, but I don't think I’ve ever seen the case so well put as in Sterne's book. His assessments of music in the digital era are judicious, intelligent, and insightful. He rightly lambasts idiotic notions of ‘piracy’ but also shows that the remarkable demonetization of music in the era of the internet cannot be reduced to a simple notion of gift relations – partly because, as he also shows, the concept of the gift is so complex (215). MP3s don't fundamentally challenge the broader capitalist condition of music. In fact they make an enormous amount of money for various organizations (especially Fraunhofer and its licensing partners).

The book is not a celebration of MP3, but it provides a positive appraisal of the careful and diligent engineering that underpinned it, and which helped to make it so suitable for a world in which music is experienced in a distracted and partial way. Sterne clearly doesn't think that distracted audition is without its problems but he recognizes the complex sociality involved in modern musical lives, and, citing to strong effect the pair of feminist theorists who write pseudonymously as J. K. Gibson-Graham, he conveys the messiness of relations between culture and capitalism. What comes across throughout the whole book, not just the tour de force final two chapters, is an expansive and generous intellect. There's a leaning towards post-structuralist cultural studies, but also wisdom in how he uses a wide range of theory to open up the way we might think about difficult problems. It's so much better than the speculations that have sometimes passed for academic research on digital media culture. (Oh dear. It seems that I’m not as generous as Sterne.)

The structure of MP3: The Meaning of a Format is a bit weird though. Sterne himself recognizes early on in the book that he will take a surprisingly long time to get to the MP3 itself. He makes some effort to justify the fact that so much of the book consists of a deep archaeology of technological developments in many ways quite remote from what MP3s actually mean in the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, perhaps because I missed links that Sterne thought should be obvious, I still had the impression of having read two books: one a cultural history of scientific audition research that deserves to be a key text in science and technology studies, and one a study of the MP3 and the changing ontology of music that deserves to be a benchmark in music studies. I now realize how much there is to know about the cultural history of sound, telephony, and indeed engineering research, and how very little I knew about these subjects before. I feel like a better person for that. But I have to confess I’m more interested in the second book, which will now be a source that I will recommend strongly to anyone interested in the music and media industries. MP3s will gradually give way to other digital audio formats, but this book will for a long time help us think better about what happened to music and culture in the 1990s and 2000s.