Appetite For Self-Destruction
Can I recommend half a book?
What made "Hit Men" so great wasn’t the narrative so much as the insider information revealed. We know the story, we want to know the backstory. Steve Knopper has written the new "Hit Men". The sequel to Fredric Dannen’s book. But it only goes up to the twenty first century. After that it’s essentially a recitation of headlines, which we all know too well.
But how did Gil Friesen get his job? Do you know the story of how Steve Jobs closed Roger Ames and Roger became the point man for the iTunes Music Store?
I didn’t know the former, but I do know the latter. Roger IM’ed me that he was going to meet with Jobs, he was thrilled the way you and me are when we meet a rock star. But Roger had met many a rock star. This was something different. This was a genius. This was a twenty first century rock star.
And I mention this story because Steve Knopper gets it right. But there are a bunch of other details that he gets only half right. Or wrong. And this is interesting because no one who was actually there will ever write the story and "Appetite For Self-Destruction" will become factual history.
We all know the Napster story, it played out in every publication known to man. But did you know some guy in the Pacific Northwest invented the CD back in the sixties? Long before Sony and Philips masterminded their own? And that the successor in interest of those patents made a killing decades later?
These are the kinds of facts exposed in "Appetite For Self-Destruction". You learn the story behind the story.
I kept saying I was going to put the book down. But then I couldn’t put it down. Which is the mark of a great read. Until I got to the points about Jobs and KaZaA and… Anybody could have written those chapters, at least most of them. Furthermore, I was depressed. Because I realized all of the excitement was at the turn of the decade, the few years thereafter, when innovation was rampant and the major labels were clueless.
The majors squandered their power. But what is more interesting is that they stifled innovation. That’s why I write about the major labels so much. Because the power they retain is a drag against progress. As for the music they release… If music were that exciting, kids wouldn’t be busy updating their Facebook profiles and playing Grand Theft Auto.
Something’s been lost. And it’s not clear exactly what it is. We don’t want the return of Tommy Mottola. But we do want the return of Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss. But they failed with Almo just like Mo and Lenny failed with DreamWorks. Because they didn’t start at the absolute bottom, they knew too much, it wasn’t fresh. Great music is not made in a factory, but in basements and bars, and if you’re lucky producers little better than amateurs can capture its rawness, keep the lightning in the bottle for all to see.
Although the emphasis of "Appetite For Self-Destruction" is the self-immolation of the major labels, the subtext is money. How the compact disc blew up record company profits. Enhanced even further by the reduction in the percentage paid to acts. The executives wanted to retain these exorbitant profits and their corporate overseers pushed them to do so. But now that money is gone.
It doesn’t matter who Guy Hands puts in at EMI, he paid too much for a company that can no longer deliver a string of million sellers.
AC/DC may be burning up the chart, but the band has no presence in the culture. That’s what Wal-Mart does to you, it speaks to your fans and truly casual buyers and that’s it. Metallica’s sales are slower, but the band means more.
But Metallica doesn’t mean that much. No one means that much. And those entrenched in the industry just can’t get over this. They want someone to blame. Shawn Fanning, Nikki Hemming, Steve Jobs, the customer. Someone must have conspired to steal their business.
But their bottom line was impacted less by the mistakes they made fighting digital music than the change in our culture. True, P2P software allowed many to own much for essentially zero, but the fact that there was such a cornucopia of options, so many entertainment choices, made it hard to build a star. Especially the kind Tommy Mottola and his Sony Music liked to construct. People like J. Lo. Low on talent, but shoved down people’s throats.
You can’t shove anything down people’s throats anymore. They don’t have to pay attention. They love train-wrecks, but they’ll only invest long term in something they discover and believe in. Which is too difficult a challenge and too expensive for too little reward for the baby boomers and their older brethren still running the record companies. What if a record had to be good to sell? What if going gold truly meant something again? That won’t pay for gas for your private jet. Certainly not in the short run.
According to Amazon, this book isn’t being released until January 6th. But I’m writing about it now because the publisher sent it to me weeks ago. I wasn’t going to write about it, because they kept e-mailing me about it, but a few pages got me hooked.
We’re all looking to get hooked.
You won’t love "Appetite For Self-Destruction", but if you work in this business you won’t be able to stop reading its first half, when all the people you know testify.
As for the public at large?
Why are there major publishers paying authors a bunch of money to write tomes that the mainstream is not into? I admire Mr. Knopper’s research, but who is going to buy this book? It needed to be a Website, not something bound between two covers. It needed to unfold online.
But the book business is not prepared for this sea change. Where people pull the information they desire when they desire online. Where heat is more important than your book tour.
The times have certainly changed. It’s got me scratching my head. Big records and movies are so bland as to appeal to everybody, around the world. TV’s a bit better, but it’s helped by a limited channel universe, even if this universe is five hundred outlets strong. Still, most of those channels get every little traffic. But they survive because advertisers want to reach this narrow sliver of audience. Your band’s audience is narrow too. Don’t try to convert outsiders, maximize the revenue from those who’ve become addicted. Outsiders don’t care about you, they care about someone else. Accept it.
