A fascinating take on the fall of a once-mighty music industry

BOOK REVIEW: JIM CARROLLreviews Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Rise and Fall of the Record Industry in the Digital Age,by Steve Knopper;

THE WRITING was on the wall a long time ago. As Steve Knopper begins his tale in the early 1980s, the record industry is railing against the introduction of the compact disc.

Back then, labels were deeply suspicious about the new format and saw it as something which would lead to widespread piracy. Retailers were up in arms too and believed customers were happy enough with vinyl and cassettes.

Such Luddite behaviour was par for the course with this industry. After all, this is the business which had stoutly rejected or resisted nearly every single technological advance, instigated the “home taping is killing music” campaign against their own customers and persisted with formats like the 8-track tape long after their sell-by date.

As history now shows, the CD format was the biggest boom the record industry ever enjoyed. Music fans went out in their droves to upgrade their collections and the labels made out like bandits because they charged more for those bright shiny plastic discs. More importantly, the new format allowed labels to rewrite artist contracts in their favour.

Naturally, most executives quickly forgot that they were the ones hell-bent on stopping the CD bandwagon in the first place.

But it would be the industry’s last such pay-day.

When the next great technological shift arrived and MP3s appeared on the horizon, the labels huffed and puffed as they’d always huffed and puffed because that was the only way they knew how to operate.

This time, though, it didn’t work as they were up against a coalition of telecom and technology companies that wouldn’t and didn’t take no for an answer.

Moreover, a wave of costly mistakes which had occurred over the previous two decades finally caught up with the industry, and record companies as we have known them went into what may well be terminal decline.

Knopper covers the music business beat for Rolling Stoneand is a sharp analyst of the game.

He's also a writer with a very clear grasp of his subject matter and it's this quality which makes Appetite for Self-Destructionsuch a wide-angled, entertaining read.

While we know the outcome from the get-go, Knopper still manages to embellish his account of the fall of a once mighty, arrogant industry with enough facts, anecdotes and pen-pictures to keep you turning the pages.

Many of the characters contained here are already familiar beasts. Those who've read Fredric Dannen's excellent Hit Men­– and Knopper's book can be seen a bit of sequel to that tome – will have already met ex-Sony Music boss Walter Yetnikoff, a man probably as famed for his temper tantrums as his business acumen.

Yetnikoff is the most colourful of a host of record label chiefs, who come across as bumbling and clueless in the face of huge cultural changes in how music is consumed.

Some of them may have been able to predict a Top 10 hit, but most of them just could not see what was coming down the line. While many of their staff were trying their best to sound the alarm bells, those at the top of the labels chose to ignore this advice and continued to count their CD windfall profits.

It took a 19-year-old kid called Shawn Fanning to shake the record industry to its core. There may have been other file-sharing networks in operation before Fanning came along, but he became the kingpin for this online revolution because of how easy his Napster system was to use.

By the time the record industry filed its first copyright infringement lawsuit in late 1999, Napster users were increasing at a rate which Fanning and his cohorts found hard to keep up with. Naturally, Fanning became a folk-hero and, not for the first time, the record labels seeking to control their own assets were painted as the bad guys.

Enter Steve Jobs, a white knight in a black polo neck. Knopper believes the Apple boss was able to do a number on the “savvy and experienced” record labels because he was in the right place at the right time. They needed a legal, easy-to-use alternative to file-sharing and, as they were running out of options, Jobs and the iTunes Music Store gave them that get-out-of-jail-free card.

That Jobs really needed the record labels onboard to enable him to flog iPods ­– and that the music men were never going to see a cent of that lucrative revenue – only became clear to label bosses long after the deal was done.

As to the future, Knopper is not be the only analyst who thinks that the boom times are well and truly over for the industry. Even when he talks about how the industry must redraft its business models to survive, he strikes a note of uncertainty as to whether even this radical overhaul will work.

With established artists like Madonna, Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails leaving major labels in favour of doing it all themselves, even the stars themselves have lost confidence in the very infrastructure which has made them stars in the first place.

The labels may persist in thinking that all they need is another blockbuster release like Michael Jackson's multi-million selling Thriller, but that really seems a far-fetched notion in this day and age.

Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Rise and Fall of the Record Industry in the Digital Age, by Steve Knopper; Simon Schuster; £17.99 (€20)