Okay, by no stretch of the imagination is this light reading. But there is nothing else like this book out there; nothing else gives you such a thorough picture of how the business of music in the 20th century has affected what we hear and buy and listen to.

The whole century is here: how the ASCAP/BMI battle raged for years and influenced everything from swing recordings to attitudes about rock and roll; how records and juke boxes and radio and movies changed the way writers made money; how recording artists "became" composers. And yes, here's one more way in which the Beatles changed the face of popular music.

In some ways the book can be disheartening for those who always figured that the world of popular music was a true capitalist meritocracy. But as the battle over napster and the net rages, it's interesting to see how the gulf between writers, performers, and the public has ALWAYS been a horrible morass of money, power, laws, unwritten rules, and manipulation.

This is a work of thorough and inpeccable scholarship. It's as if he knew that no one else was going to try to tell this story, so he'd better include every last tidbit. Fascinating in its detail, amazing in its scope, this is a must-read work for any student of American popular music.