IN a week in which Oasis are working hand in hand with a multi-national, Sony, in an effort to censor (and there's no other word for it) unofficial websites about the band, it's a spooky coincidence to pick up a revealing book about the music industry which details how the artists themselves often collude with the all-powerful big business players who run the whole damn thing. (Just for the record, Oasis are determined to prevent some of their fans from running totally innocuous and non-profit making sites that carry their lyrics, sound files and photography. This seems to be dumb, and totally against the spirit of rock music - rivalling in my mind U2's dealings with Negativland. Get with it, Noel.)

The Mansion On The Hill, a book by Rolling Stone's Fred Goodman, opens by asking "how do you start with people smoking dope in places like Boston and San Francisco and wind up with Sony and Time Warner?" - as this is essentially the story of rock/pop/ popular music since its inception. As chillingly brilliant and eye-opening as Fred Dannen's Hit Men book, it differs from the latter by looking at the complicity of the "artists" themselves, focusing mainly on the careers of Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen. (In a separate story, it was revealed last week in the British press that Bob Dylan has been playing private, paid gigs for corporate companies in the US - cheers Bob, was selling one of your songs to a credit-card company two years ago not enough to satisfy your massive bank account?)

Goodman makes the point that despite all its inherent superstar contradictions, rock music is supposed to be about integrity. credibility and the challenging of injustices, whether economic or social. He demonstrates how Dylan, Young and Springsteen, while appearing to be uninterested in money and having a long-term career, have succeeded in making vast amounts of money and prolonging their careers way past their relevance date. He proceeds to dissect the working methods of Jon Landau and David Geffen (two of the biggest movers in the industry).

Goodman concludes that there is a clinical, and often greedy and grasping, financial reality behind the rock music myth. The Mansion On The Hill (which is also the title of three different songs by Hank Williams, Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen) will convince you of the idiocy of anyone who thinks that rock'n'roll was ever about - changing the world. So what is it about then, Mr Goodman?

"Well, I'm still looking for that thing - and I find that the records still move you. If you feel disappointed that we haven't wound up where we hoped we would, there are still the great moments. To me, the depressing part is just the notion that the critical currency gets misspent so frequently. The rock press has been so badly eclipsed by video and by the fact that you can read record reviews in every newspaper and magazine in the country. Rock wins because it becomes omnipresent and moves into the mainstream."

So have we all been victims of a financial hoax? "I was really trying to do something that wasn't just a business book, that was about a social period. There was an interview I did for the book that really stuck in my mind - it was a guy who'd been a real hippy and had dropped out. And he told me about how when he first heard Bob Dylan he knew for a fact that money was shit. Then he said he looked around later on and he wasn't so sure. He said he'd thought about what those of us who were there with our hearts threw away and about the sharp-eyed ones who came along later and picked it up."