Burgess has already published his successful book The Art of Music Production, which includes a sort of how-to approach to music production, but which is clearly not aimed at popular music scholars. Now he adds The History, which focuses on technical developmetns, societal framings and a selection of key figures in either technical inventions or music production itself. Having this focus, the book competes with other seminal publications such as the ones by Mark Cunningham (1998), Mark Katz (2004), Evan Eisenberg (2005) and Virgil Moorefield (2005). However, this book also needs to be compared with basic articles on recording, recording studios or processes in encyclopaedias such as the Continuum Encyclopaedia of Popular Music of the World and The New Grove Dictionary. Surprisingly none of the titles mentioned can be found in Burgess's bibliography or notes.