Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
too many trees, not enough wood, 21 Jul 2009
How do you write about the rise (let alone the fall) of the entire record industry? It's a potentially huge subject - you could fill whole textbooks on technological changes, business history, artistic developments, etc....Where would you stop? I've read a few, rather unsatisfying, books that try to get round this problem by shoehorning the story into an artificial narrative, usually skimming over the early years and fast-forwarding straight to the sixties (a treasure trove of narrative cliche, of course).
This book is enjoyable and mostly interesting, but unfortunately suffers the opposite problem - it could do with a bit more in the way of narrative. The author never seems to take a step back and provide an overview of the subject - instead, we get a relentless procession of facts, with little in the way of context. Names of directors, companies, and subsidiaries start to blur into one; labels are born, taken over and killed off again with confusing rapidity.
To be fair, the author does narrow his scope in that he has concentrated on the business side of the industry, rather than the technological or artistic. This makes the book unique in an otherwise crowded market. There is a lot of interesting stuff here, but it's by no means a light read. For the committed only.
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7 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE BOOK ABOUT THE MUSIC INDUSTRY - EVER!, 3 May 2004
From the moment Edison captured Mary Had A Little Lamb on a piece of tin foil in 1877 right up to the state of the industry today, this book tells the story of the highs and lows of the music business like no other. Absolutely superb
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A 70 year abberation?, 1 Nov 2009
This book tells you everything you could ever possibly want to know about the industry that records and distributes music. We now tend to call it the music industry, but for many generations it was called the Record Industry, because its products were exclusively gramophone records. The book is a "warts and all" look at the origins, growth, glory days and downfall of the industry. It paints a vivid and compelling picture of the rise, glory and eventual fall of that industry and calls for it to abandon its attempts to put back the clock and effect its metamorphosis into something new.
The book starts by dispelling some myths and simplifications about the origins of the record industry. It may be handy as a quiz answer to say that Thomas Alva Edison invented recording, but the full story is a lot more complicated. There are similar stories about the invention of the flat disc gramophone record, and other inventions crucial to the formation of the industry.
Mr Barfe shows, by reference to actual letters and contracts how initially reluctant the established stars of the Edwardian era were to commit their work to record. Very far from seeing the record as a way to greater stardom or riches, they were deeply suspicious of it and had to be enticed, cajoled or even bought to make those initial records. This section of the book makes it very clear that artists were making a good living by playing live music and many felt they had absolutely had no need of this extra new outlet. We see in this section of the book how powerless were the record companies in those early days.
Next, the book shows that what gradually happened was that artists came to see the release of records as an adjunct to their live performances, reaching far more people than they ever could by endlessly touring the country or the world. We see how, once the artists were "sold" on the idea of making records, the boot slowly transferred to the other foot and the record companies themselves became ever more powerful, with artists flocking through their doors to commit their talents to shellac or (later) vinyl. We see how it eventually became possible for record companies to break an artists reputation as well as make it.
In the section on the "glory days" of the industry we see how the consolidation of the industry into a small number of giant companies enabled these companies to exercise a huge degree of control over music of all kinds. Because it owned the means of production and distribution of music, the industry tended to act as a gatekeeper between "the talent" and the consumer. Intentionally or otherwise this meant that the industry was self-serving, ruthlessly controlling distribution networks and promotion outlets, making any competition very hard, except between the established giants. Breakthroughs by upstart newcomers were quickly stifled or bought off and any technical innovation was slowed to a crawl because of entrenched interests.
Risque songster George Formby's wife Beryl was also his business manager. She came to see that allowing George to make records enabled him to "Make money while he sleeps". For the biggest recording stars from the 1930s onward the money poured in from sales percentages, and radio play royalties. Some Victorian music hall stars were well paid, but none of them could ever have dreamed of making the amount of money made by the top recording stars of the later 20th century. No wonder everyone wanted to be part of it, and that nobody rocked the boat too hard. By the 1960s, many top bands flirted with the idea of ONLY making records, the original idea of playing live was sometimes completely abandoned, it was a hassle that got in the way of making more records and more money.
We see how, during these glory days, the music industry was for a great many, a gravy train and a license to print money. We see how in the 1980s the industry was (in many quarters reluctantly) forced to make the transition from Vinyl to CD and how, despite the format change, it seemed as if the gravy train would keep rolling on silver rather than black wheels. But then, in the last few chapters, we see how the gravy train was fairly suddenly and unceremoniously derailed in the late 1990s. As home PCs, The Internet and audio compression formats such as MP3 came into the mainstream, we see how the industry lost its stranglehold on distribution and even on the creation of recorded music. We see its almost comical, Canute-like, efforts to put the genie back in the bottle - a process that has been going on for almost ten years. Louis Barfe describes in some detail why those efforts were, and are doomed.
We see today the music industry fighting a rearguard action against some very simple truths. Firstly you or I could, if we had the talent, use the computer we have in front of us to "make a record" and distribute it via the Internet. We would not need a record company, recording studio, or factory to make records or fleets of lorries to take our record out to the masses. Second, if music can be played it can be pirated - and there's no point in making recorded music that you can't play, right? No amount of legislation or prohibition is going to change these facts. This book makes that crystal clear.
Whether this new state is fair or not, it IS the state of affairs. One could suggest that the old state of affairs was unfair too. One day in 1963 four guys from Liverpool went into a studio in London for 12 hours and recorded 14 songs. Now, over 45 years later, two of those four guys are dead, and the cost of the recording session has been recouped thousands, if not millions of times over and the participants rewarded thousands fold. Many millions of copies of those tracks have been sold at premium prices over 45+ years, yet, the "Please Please Me" album is STILL retailing at £7.98 (or almost £17 for the new mono remaster). Precious little natural justice there really, and not something that could ever have happened pre-recording industry.
More than anything else, this book shows how music and music performance was, for about 70 years "owned" (in every sense) by the record industry. Louis Barfe demonstrates that this had not been the case before, and that it won't be the case in the future. In other words it was a 70 year "window" created by deliberate technological inertia, and arguably swinging copyright laws that are highly skewed against the consumer. A window that is now closing.
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by Prof David Hesmondhalgh
by Steve Gordon
