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Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age

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In the sub-sub-genre of books about rock music and the industry, I rank this right up there with classics like "Hit Men" and "The Death of Rhythm and Blues." We think in terms of "industry," but through his deftly drawn portraits of industry leaders, Knopper helps us see clearly how we got to here from there: simple bad decision making and a blatant refusal to consider, first, that the world had changed and then a stunning lack of curiosity about how it had changed. Highly recommended. Enjoy!

This is an excellent book. Steve Knopper, contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine, and who has also written for such publications as Wired, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly and the Chicago Tribune, has written this book detailing the trends from the near death of the music industry in the late 70s to early 80s to the life-saving entities such as MTV and Michael Jackson's "Thriller" album. Knopper provides meticulous detail about the negative and positive trends of the music industry over the past 20 years to the newly developed digital age of downloading music via iTunes. Knopper mentions names of major labor leaders; details the decisions these major labels have made that have been effective and those decisions that have been fairly detrimental.

Moreover, Knopper describes how the rise of Napster ultimately lead to severe bleeding within the music industry due to the consumer now having the knowledge to easily pirate music. The reaction of the music industry to Napster and its smaller subsequent file-sharing groups eventually lead to the now slow death of major labels. Knopper details how and why this happened. Additionally, Knopper details how Steve Jobs (of Apple computers) strong-armed the five major music labels into deals that lead to iTunes and huge sales of the iPod. This trend ultimately changed the music industry and pushed it into a direction to which it has not adjusted very well.

In fact, according to Knopper, it has taken the major music labels nearly ten years to realize how technology can actually help the industry, but now its probably too late. Moreover, many bands and artists are actually turning to their own independent methods of releasing their new albums and songs. These bands and artists (such as NIN, Radiohead, the Eagles, etc.) are realizing that this new avenue is actually more appealing to their listeners and making them a larger profit than they ever had signing contracts with the major labels.

This, and much more is described in great detail in this work. This is a very telling book about how greed and ignorance has actually cost the music industry in the long run. And, according to Knopper, if the major labels do not make massive changes very quickly, the music industry as we have known it for the last several decades will no longer exist.

This book is a nice recollection over the most catastrophic moments of the music industry since the late 70s to date. If you follow the news on music and technology regularly, you might not be too surprised to read something that you probably already know, but this material is just great for somebody who have developed sudden interest in this subject.

It covers the supposed disco and boy band obsession which record labels dived in and hoped that it would last forever, the "pay-to-play" practices that made the Top 40 a place where only paid music - not necessarily good music - deserved to be, lousy contracts which exploited artists to the bone, skepticism over new technologies and business models and disrespectful practices toward consumers (the infamous Sony BMG CDs infected with root kits, the inflated Album CD prices, the killing of CD singles and the RIAA lawsuits), showing that the music industry had made one mistake after another that ended up leading it to the situation it is today.

The only thing I disagree about the author's thoughts is the notion that the CD is deemed to die completely. I don't really think this is going to happen, because CDs still caters to a great number of people who cares about a better sound quality (which is far better then MP3, as a matter of fact) and likes to hold a physical, collectible product. It is correct to assume that less and less CDs will be sold over time and that shelf space devoted to them is getting thinner, but it is not going to disappear completely.

Entertaining and easy to read book, go for it.

Being in my early forties, I am just old enough (and just young enough) to have lived through pretty much every stage of the decline of the record industry so painstakingly detailed in this book.

I grew up going to record stores, then chain stores, then saw the advent of the CD when I started college. I lived through the CD boom and read about big-name acts signing new contracts worth untold millions of dollars primarily because their back catalogs were selling so well when the world was upgrading their record collections from vinyl to CD. I watched in horror as the "boy bands" seemed to take over. I again watched in horror as the labels pushed only the best-selling artists and dumped the rest from their rosters. I moaned in disbelief when I learned that WalMart was the biggest brick-and-mortar retailer of recorded music, and that was sad and unfortunate because their selection was so narrow. I nearly cried as the rock radio stations I listened to became far more repetitive and far less interesting. I was initially horrified by Napster and sided with Metallica -- file swapping was theft, plain and simple. But the labels' litigious response to it was no less outrageous. Understandable on some level, but outrageous nonetheless. When digital music became the norm, the powers-that-be did everything they could to stem the tide, and they did it in such a way to sour the record-buying experience.

Perhaps worst of all, though, is that the "album" has all but died. It's all about the hit single. There is almost no such thing as artist development anymore. Remember a few decades ago when artist would put out a record every calendar year and tour behind it every calendar year? Each year you could count on seeing your favorite band (Van Halen, Journey, KISS, Rush, The Police, maybe even The Who) tour all over the U.S., even hitting the secondary markets. Nowadays many big-name artists wait up to 3 or 4 years between releases. MTV and the labels milking every last drop from every last album changed all that.

Basically, I lived through every milestone event Steve Knopper details in this book. I stood on the sidewalk and watched that entire fiasco parade pass by. This book reads like an "E! True Hollywood Story" account of the demise of the record industry. Part of the fun of browsing through a huge record store's bins was getting to discover and listen to new music. Not any more. There's a huge difference between trying out a new record at the listening station and hearing a 30-second snippet on iTunes or Amazon. There's very little of the feeling of ownership anymore, at least with digital download. No more opening up the record or CD to peruse the insert booklet, read the liner notes, read the lyrics, look at the artwork and photos, check the credits to see what guest artist or studio musicians may have played on it or co-written a tune or two.

But in today's world that may not be important to everyone. It's hard to believe, but there is an entire generation of kids out there buying music online who have NEVER set foot in a record store EVER. Boggles the mind. I'm getting old, but I'm not THAT old.

Many people my age saw most of these events as they happened. The great thing about Knopper's book is that we now have names to put with those events. We know the "what", and thanks to Knopper's research we also know the "who", "why", and "how".

As with many other culture-shifting events and history-making events, the change in the tide isn't always an inevitable force of nature. Often it is the end result of the actions (or lack of action) of a relatively few people of influence, the events affected by their individual personalities, ambitions, prejudices, greediness, or what-have-you. You might even say that the whole reason the record industry playing field was moved in the first place was because of the rise of the personal computer, and for that we have various players like Gates, Jobs, Woz, folks at the Palo Alto Research Center at Xerox, IBM, etc. One might say the music business changed so dramatically because the personal computer industry simply came into existence. Had the latter never developed (or developed differently), the former may not have changed the same way.

I guess a better introduction for Knopper's book could have been the book "Accidental Empires" or the PBS documentary "Triumph of the Nerds". Everything that happens is a result of many seemingly unrelated things that happened previously. Everything is connected.

"Appetite For Self-Destruction" is a fascinating book. Highly recommended.

Music fans and industry watchdogs will already know many of the details in this book, but Steve Knopper illustrates the downfall of the music business as a long historical process going back almost to its own beginnings. While the standard villains in industry's recent collapse are file sharing and unprotected digital music, Knopper shows that the music industry already had an entrenched structural pattern of booms and busts, poor money management, aversion to new technologies, and inability to adapt to new consumer behaviors. File sharers are not totally to blame for the industry's collapse, since file sharing is an embrace of the same digital technologies that the industry once used to soak consumers during the CD boom, and a reaction to the industry's decades-old manipulation of price and distribution. Now the industry can do little more than fantasize about the glory days and sue its own customer base in order to scrape out a few more years of anemic income.

Knopper puts all of these trends into a long-term historical perspective that really shows how the record companies brought their demise on themselves and how the industry is inherently unsustainable, notwithstanding a few decades of temporary big profits. The only real problem is that this historical focus is off-kilter in places, with an over-aggrandizement of fads like disco and boy band pop as the lynchpins for huge business developments. In the book's closing chapter, Knopper makes some predictions about the future of digital song sales and the decline of the CD that are quite speculative and might make the book outdated very soon,

A better conclusion would have been an analysis of how musicians will always create and fans will always consume, but maybe industrial-sized distribution and economics are unnatural for the creative world, and that big business is incompatible with the interpersonal creation and enjoyment of music. Knopper comes close to a strong cultural discussion to go with his historical analysis. But he falters a bit by focusing only on the big business, which is the same mistake the industry has made. Music will survive, but the industrial manipulation of it is finished. Now let's find a new and better way for honest musicians to make a living. [~doomsdayer520~]

Ever since I was 9, I've been a huge music fan, buying first records, then cassettes, then CDs by the boatload. During my college days in the early 90's, I lived my life in Tower Records and Newbury Comics browsing the racks. I think most people my age watched the demise of the music industry in the past ten years with a certain sadness. How was it that an incredibly powerful industry went from raking in the dough to crashing and burning.

Steve Knopper sets out to answer that question in Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. For most, including myself, the simple answer is that napster and file sharing destroyed the industry. Knopper digs deeper, starting off in the end of the Disco Era, Knopper traces an industry that continues to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in spite of itself. Along the way, Knopper nails down the many missteps that piled up for the industry, including excessive CD prices, killing the single (which made people pay $15 for 1 or 2 hits), excessive copy protection, outdated and expensive promotional methods, embracing the big box retailers at the expense of record stores, goinand finally, failing to embrace the digital file age until it was too late (and Apple had the upperhand).

Appetite for Self-Destruction is a fascinating portrait of what happens when an industry fails to adjust to changing times. While Knopper hits on the eccentric nature of the players in the business, he eschews the gossipy tone typical this type of books and instead points to the business problems that brought the industry down.

While Knopper makes clear that illegal downloads hurt the industry, he does not place the entire blame on illegal file sharing. He points out that the industry's biggest problem was not the theft of music, but their outright refusal to deal with it on any level beyond suing the pants off of people who posted files for sharing. There were several in the industry who felt that the record companies should start selling files online, and several aborted attempts at creating an iTunes like service occurred throughout the industry, but nobody wanted to let go of the cash cow that was the CD.

Appetite For Self Destruction is a great book for any music fan or business student wanting to see a case history of an industry that fails to adjust to changing times.

Having also read the recent "Ripped" by Greg Kot, which covers the same subject, I award this one the prize. It's more comprehensive and the author interviewed many more of the players who have changed the recorded music market for the worse over the past 10 years. It's a grim tale and there is no happy ending unless you are Steve Jobs who managed to almost corner the digital download market for his iPod, a tool that is overpriced and not good sounding enough. Those who mourn the death of albums, and/or cds, should read this to learn why it is now becoming almost impossible to find recorded music for sale in anything but the sonically inferior mp3 format. Gggrrrrrrr ....

This review is for the digital edition of this book only.

I normally frown on reviews that focus on something besides the actual contents of the book, but here's the thing: This is a book about the GREED of the music industry and how it led to its downfall. So I would think the publishers of this book (Simon and Schuster Digital Sales), would have taken a lesson from it. Instead, they priced the digital edition of this book at nealry 60% MORE than the NEW PAPERBACK PRICE.

What? Why? There are no physical printing costs. There are no storage costs. Yet for some reason the publisher prices this ebook edition at $17.99 (as of this writing), while Amazon is selling the new, in-print paperback edition at $11.53. (Even the list price of the paperback is a dollar less than the digital price!)

Honestly, I would have bought this book if it were priced at or below the new paperback price. But it's not happening now, Simon and Schuster. Sorry.

Someday, someone will write a similarly-themed book about the book publishing business. What it will be called, I don't know, but mark my words, in ten years people will look back and examine what it was that killed book publishing, and the verdict will the same as it was for the music industry: GREED.

A common criticism of AFSD is that it's merely a music industry timeline from 1979-2007. Yes, this book does provide a comprehensive, detailed account of how the industry has evolved during the last three decades. Profoundly more important than the facts and figures, though, is how author Steve Knopper puts it all into perspective.

Many people don't know that heads of major labels initially resisted the CD format. Musicians and music fans alike often don't realize how the CD's inception into the American marketplace attracted Wall Street, rewarded big-spending record execs, and ultimately facilitated a business model that made those big spenders resistant to the digital age. It's also not exactly common knowledge that the CD's development began in the early 1960's, or that the early stages of MP3's were actually attempts during the late 70's to transmit data through telephone lines.

The common thread of all these factors is that the music business and music consumption patterns do not move in a vacuum. Consumer behavior, whether or not consumers actually pay, has been hugely driven by new technological developments that were previously (and wrongly) perceived as being insignificant. AFSD depicts the ramifications of this myopic vision, most notably the industry's failure to capitalize on Napster's initial popularity and the eventual surrender to iTunes. You might be shocked at some of the business deals that went down in flames before Steve Jobs infiltrated his Mac-based world into the music business.

Steve Knopper concludes AFSD in a rather open-ended manner, which is another major criticism of this book. Of course, it would be awesome if Knopper could gaze into his crystal ball and tell us exactly where the record industry will be in 2020. Falling short on psychic powers, nonetheless, AFSD insightfully summarizes where we've been, adding new perspective on where the industry is now and potentially where it will go in the near future.

Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age is music journalist (and Rolling Stone contributor) Steve Knopper's chronology and analysis of the various blunders, missteps and all-out catastrophes of the music industry in recent years. From flooding the market with disco in the 70's to suing downloaders in recent days, Knopper examines the failings and missed opportunities that cost the record industry in a monumental way.

What's so fascinating about this tale is just how short-sighted and childish these industry executives could be. The obvious example is the industry's hostile reaction to the advent of digital music. Not just their justifiable anger towards illegal downloading, but their failure to realize digital music's sales potential. Steve Jobs, of course, laughed all the way to the bank over that one. Beyond the war on Napster and the RIAA lawsuits, Appetite for Self-Destruction looks at the industry's resistance to the CD format, its over-reliance on a few key artists, and incestuous management structures and attendant power plays. Midway through the book you start to wonder how any of these idiots ever made it to the corner offices in the first place, and whether any of them even likes music to begin with.

The book falters a bit during overlong looks at the technical development of the compact disc and the personal antics of various music big shots, and the detailed descriptions of the power plays, mergers, and management shuffling of the major labels is enough to induce drowsiness. Still, there's plenty of "meat" here, and plenty of insider accounts to add spice to the story (though Apple's Steve Jobs is a conspicuous absence). Knopper sets a brisk pace and even if the book is essentially "Monday morning quarterbacking", his observations are spot-on and insightful enough to make you wonder what might have been had adults been minding the store.

If you're interested in what goes on behind the scenes in the record industry, or are passionate enough about music to fear for its future, Appetite for Self-Destruction is a must read.