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Appetite for Self-Destruction

The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age

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Appetite for Self-Destruction

By: Steve Knopper
Narrated by: Dan John Miller
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About this listen

 For the first time, Appetite for Self-Destruction recounts the 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 of denial and bad decisions in the face of dramatic advances in technology.

Based on interviews with more than 200 music industry sources - from Warner Music chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr. to renegade Napster creator Shawn Fanning - Knopper is the first to offer such a detailed and sweeping contemporary history of the industry's wild ride through the past three decades.

From the birth of the compact disc, through the explosion of CD sales in the '80s and '90s, the emergence of Napster, and the secret talks that led to iTunes, to the current collapse of the industry as CD sales plummet, Knopper takes us inside the boardrooms, recording studios, private estates, garage computer labs, company jets, corporate infighting, and secret deals of the big names and behind-the-scenes players who made it all happen.

©2009 Steve Knopper (P)2009 Brilliance Audio, Inc. Business Aspects History & Criticism Music Business
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Just over 10 years on from the date of publication, where the story of the book ends, this is a fascinating study of an industry that sowed the seeds of its own distruction and then clapped its hands over its ears and went ‘la la lah lahhh!’ whilst it fell apart.

Napster showed the way forward, an industry then ignored the warning signs and sued its own customers. The keys of the kingdom were gifted to Apple. Even as far back as the late 70s/early 80s, record industry execs feared and would resist any news technology on a knee jerk basis. Remember just how many CDs were sold, the price per album? How many people got rich? The industry at first tried to ignore and then push back on the very format that would make them richer than ever.

Knooper’s book is essential reading for music fans, texhnooogy fans or anyone with an interest in how an entire industry failed to recognise its own threatened obsolescence.

An eye opening and compulsive read.

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