Charting the record industry's blunders
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Remember when music criticism was about content and culture, not distribution or technology? Steve Knopper's "Appetite for Self-Destruction" convincingly proves that's no longer true. In case anyone had doubts, just follow the so-called record industry as it commits protracted hara-kiri on the business pages.
A longtime contributor to Rolling Stone, a magazine built on the increasingly sliced and diced field of pop music, Knopper tracks the record industry from the late 1970s, when Chicago DJ Steve Dahl tried to murder disco, to today, when MP3s swamp more traditional forms of musical enjoyment - including the compact disc, its last "savior."
Knopper argues that record companies are a dinosaur still attempting to control musical content and distribution through copyright and far more invidious constraints. The latter include Minimum Advertised Price, or MAP, guaranteeing a store that sold CDs above a certain price an advertising "bonus" (the practice was outlawed); megamillion-dollar deals with legacy artists like Bruce Springsteen who have difficulty returning on investment because they don't reach beyond their original demographic; and the infamous "rootkit"
Such moves, promoted by the Recording Industry Association of America in the name of artist protection, instead generated massive ill will and accelerated the drive toward downloading, the file sharing pioneered by Napster, and the eventual triumph of the iPod.
Some executives Knopper profiles are more venal than others: At one end of the scale is former CBS executive Walter Yetnikoff, who brought us "Thriller," the last album to pump up the record volume. At the other is Edgar Bronfman Jr., the former Seagram executive who heads Warner and in the '90s put together a powerhouse label group under the Universal umbrella. None seems willing to embrace new technology, their blind spot.
Even Hilary Rosen, the whipping girl for the RIAA, admitted that "no matter what the courts ever say, the courts can't keep up with technology," after the US Supreme Court in 2005 ruled against Kazaa, Grokster, and Morpheus for copyright protection violation.
Laced with anecdote, buttressed by detailed accounts of the most flagrant record-industry transgressions, "Appetite" (its title nicked from that of the Guns N' Roses debut disc) is an enthralling read, equal parts anger and regret. Knopper's writing is sharp, his approach sharper: "By the late 1990s, the record business had boiled down much of the business to a simple formula: 2 good songs + 10 or 12 mediocre songs = 1 $15 CD, meaning billions in overall sales," he writes. Executing that strategy through big-box stores like
In the '70s, books like Greil Marcus's "Mystery Train" and Geoffrey Stokes's "Star-Making Machinery" focused on the music and the bands. In the '90s, Fredric Dannen's "Hit Men," which Knopper cites as an inspiration, shifted focus to the business. Today, keeping up with the technology of music distribution and format (including MP3s, the iPod and its competitors, and the growing business of ringtones) is the proper focus of the music industry reporter, a duty Knopper meets effectively.
In early November 2007, I bought a copy of Radiohead's "In Rainbows," an "album" the band had released in October as a download only, price to be set by the customer. What I bought at Oscars Club in Beijing was a double CD with a fake wood box, laminated/illustrated discs, and lyrics. The sound quality was good, the packaging impressive. "In Rainbows" wasn't released as a legitimate CD in England until late that December. Its US release was January 2008. I bought my Chinese Radiohead bootleg for the equivalent of $3. Tip to Knopper: Write a book about Oscars Club. That's where the music (not to mention video) action is.
Cleveland freelance writer Carlo Wolff is the author of "Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories."
