I spent 34 years writing for daily papers, most of them at the News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina. I’ve also freelanced for numerous magazines, primarily about music, while hosting a podcast and writing the occasional book. Through it all I’ve had a particular fascination for the music business and its peculiar ways, especially record companies. The industry’s darker side was the subject of my first book way back in 2000, the novel Off The Record, which was a notebook dump of thinly fictionalized war stories I’d accumulated over the years. The record business is the subject of my latest book, too, although it’s a much more positive story.
I wrote...
Oh, Didn't They Ramble: Rounder Records and the Transformation of American Roots Music
A remarkable label, Rounder Records’ story goes back to the 1960s, a decade the three college students who founded it spent vagabonding around the country going to folk festivals. They would encounter worthy artists in this world who had never recorded, but the big record companies weren’t interested. So they started Rounder in 1970 to do it themselves, an odyssey in which they put out more than 3,000 albums – more than one a week for 50-plus years. While they were a specialty niche label, Rounder had some improbable commercial successes, striking gold and platinum with blues-rocker George Thorogood and bluegrass-queen-turned-pop-star Alison Krauss. Rounder also eventually expanded into almost every genre imaginable, from college-radio alternative rock to reggae, helping to create the big-tent format known as Americana.
A century ago, the record industry sent representatives all over the country to do field recordings of vernacular artists playing folk, blues, and early country for “hillbilly” and “race” records (the sort that Rounder would start putting out in the 1970s).
One of these scouts was Ralph Peer from the Victor Talking Machine Company, for which he oversaw 1927’s legendary “Bristol Sessions.” It was the first time that Hall of Fame titans the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers recorded, generally cited as the beginning of the country music industry.
As explained in Barry Mazor’s excellent biography, Peer went on to become one of the giants of the recording and publishing industry, laying the groundwork that pretty much every record label including Rounder has followed since.
This is the first biography of Ralph Peer, the revolutionary A&R man and music publisher who pioneered the recording, marketing, and publishing of blues, jazz, country, gospel, and Latin music, and this book book tracks his role in such breakthrough events as the recording of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” the first country recording sessions with Fiddlin’ John Carson, his discovery of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, the popularizing of Latin American music during World War II, and the postwar transformation of music on the airwaves that set the stage for the dominance of R&B,…
You might think that every artist you hear on the radio is rolling in dough, and it does work out that way for a fortunate few.
But for the vast majority of acts, recording and releasing and promoting music is an enormous amount of work with an uncertain payoff that may never come. Geoffrey Stokes’ from-the-trenches account of the 1970s-vintage country-rock band Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen taking their major-label shot is an eye-opening account of how the sausage gets made – and how hard it is to break even.
In contrast to expensive sessions that leave artists in debt, Rounder’s model was always proudly low-budget.
Follows the musicians, engineers, technicians, and others involved in the making of a typical rock album, from initial concept through packaging and marketing, detailing the entire process of those involved
Commander Cody made that album for Warner Brothers Records during the time when the U.S. record business was grossing over a billion dollars a year.
During those heady days, no label group better exemplified the positive side of the industry than Warner, which stood as proof that you really could have profits with honor. From Frank Sinatra to Madonna, Warner put out music that generated sales and critical acclaim in equal measure.
Stan Cornyn was an executive at Warner for 34 years, overseeing countless publicity campaigns, and this delicious memoir evokes the industry’s glory days in the prestige penthouse. If Rounder was the cream of the independent-label crop, Warner was top of the major-label heap.
That's how Vanity Fair described the record business turmoil of the 1990s, which moved the Warner Music Group -- the world's number one record company -- from the entertainment pages to the front pages. Suddenly, decades of riotous fun and booming business went splat. Top music executives got evicted from their offices, some escorted by company guards. Why? The answers are in Exploding -- the most insightful and delightful book about the record business ever written.
In the rock explosion of the Sixties and Seventies, Warner Bros., Atlantic, and Elektra Records dominated the business as the Warner Music Group. But…
Up until the internet took over, radio airplay was the record industry’s lifeblood, and labels would do just about anything to get it. That included hiring independent radio promoters, and not asking too many questions about what they were doing to get certain records on the air at big stations.
Hit Men is an incredible tale of an ugly mid-1980s payola (play for pay) scandal, one that had rumors of organized crime involvement. It’s exactly the sort of sordid big-business shenanigans that made grassroots outfits like Rounder a lot more appealing.
Also recommended, William Knoedelseder’s Stiffed: A True Story of MCA, The Music Business, and the Mafia, which covers much of the same ground.
Copiously researched and documented, Hit Men is the highly controversial portrait of the pop music industry in all its wild, ruthless glory: the insatiable greed and ambition; the enormous egos; the fierce struggles for profits and power; the vendettas, rivalries, shakedowns, and payoffs. Chronicling the evolution of America's largest music labels from the Tin Pan Alley days to the present day, Fredric Dannen examines in depth the often venal, sometimes illegal dealings among the assorted hustlers and kingpins who rule over this multi-billion-dollar business.
The record industry was at its compact-disc-era peak in the late 1990s, when a tech firm called Napster went into business. A file-sharing service, Napster allowed listeners to trade digital versions of songs online for free.
The record industry ignored it at first and then tried to fight it before giving in and offering its music for purchase as online downloads, but it was too late. The genie was out of the bottle, and label revenue plunged by more than half. There were some grim years before online streaming took hold, which boosted the record industry to its highest peak ever in the 2020s.
By then, Rounder was no longer an independent label – sold to the Concord Music Group. It exists to this day, but on a more modest scale than before.
For the first time, Appetite for Self-Destruction recounts the epic story of the precipitous rise and fall of the recording industry over the past three decades, when the incredible success of the CD turned the music business into one of the most glamorous, high-profile industries in the world—and the advent of file sharing brought it to its knees.
In a comprehensive, fast-paced account full of larger-than-life personalities, Rolling Stone contributing editor Steve Knopper shows that, after the incredible wealth and excess of the '80s and '90s, Sony, Warner, and the other big players brought about their own downfall through years…
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
Each of the sections is written from the perspective of the mythical Taurus, from the beginning at Lascaux to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, and elsewhere. This is not just a history of the bull but also a view of ourselves through the eyes of the bull, illustrating our pre-literate use of myth, how the advent of writing and the urban revolution changed our view of ourselves, and how even bullfighting in Spain is a variation on the ancient sacrifice of the sacred bull.
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. In I Am Taurus, author Stephen Palmer traces the story of the bull in the sky, starting from that point 19,000 years ago - a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull. Each of the eleven sections is written from the perspective of the mythical Taurus, from the beginning at Lascaux to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Greece, Spain and elsewhere. This is not just a history of the bull but also an attempt to see ourselves through…
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