Product Description

Louis Barfe's elegantly written, authoritative and highly entertaining history charts the meteoric rise and slow decline of the popular recording industry. Barfe shows how the 1920s and 1930s saw the departure of Edison from the phonograph business he created and the birth of EMI and CBS. the arrival of Elvis Presley changed popular music (and sales of popular music) overnight. After Presley came the Beatles, when the recording industry became global and record sales reached all time highs. But the 1990s ushered in a period of profound crisis and uncertainty in the industry, encapsulated in one word: Napster. Barfe shows how the almost infinite amounts of free music available online have traumatic and disastrous consequences for an industry that has become cautious and undynamic.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #296093 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback

Review
'A winner... This wonderful book tells the tale of recorded sound from the very beginning... Louis Barfe tells this tale with wit, accuracy... and an acute awareness of how the machinations of the record world were affected by contemporary social and political events.' Tim Rice, Literary Review 'An amazingly comprehensive history... Barfe writes cleanly and concisely enough to lead the reader through the maze that is the history of the record industry... A real eye-opener.' Doug Johnstone, Scotland on Sunday 'Barfe's comprehensive research is peppered with entertaining anecdotes, while his approach combines a weighty respect for his subject with a healthy dose of cynicism. There will always be music; who owns it is another question.' Metro 'A scholarly yet entertaining tome... ****' Paul Stokes, Q Magazine 'A fascinating expose of the recording industry... An exhilarating read that conjures up the world of those who make recordings, and the commercial realities and pitfalls facing those who produce them... Riveting.' Classic FM Magazine Best Buy

Sir Tim Rice in the Literary Review, June 2004
This remarkable book...This wonderful book...Louis Barfe tells this absorbing tale with wit [and] accuracy...this is a winner.

Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph, 8 May 2004
Corporate histories are seldom lively reading...Barfe's book crackles and hisses with dinner-party trivia...

Customer Reviews

A 70 year abberation?
"Anyone in the legal or political world who has something to
do with formulating policy on music downloads should read this book very
carefully.

The early parts of this book tell 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 that industry at its height, and ends by calling on the
industry to abandon its attempts to put back the clock and urges 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 yet
greater stardom or riches, they were deeply suspicious of it and had to be
enticed, cajoled or even coerced to make those initial records. This section of
the book makes it very clear that artists were making a living by playing live
music (as artists always had done) 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 artist as well as make them.

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.

In the section on the "glory days" of the industry
we see how the consolidation of the industry into a small number of large
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. For the best companies the money absolutely poured in.

No wonder then that everyone who had anything to do with
music wanted to be in good with a record company and that nobody rocked the
boat too hard. By the 1960s, many top bands flirted with the idea of ONLY
making records, the traditional idea of playing live music in front of people
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 continue rolling forever, but 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. Truth 1: You or I could, if we had the talent,
use the computer we have in front of us now to "make a record" and
promote and distribute it via the Internet. We would not need a record company,
recording studio, or factory to make records, we would not need fleets of
lorries to take copies of our record out to the masses. Truth 2: If recorded
music can be played it can be pirated - and there's no point in making recorded
music that you can't play, right? The point is, no amount of legislation or
prohibition is going to change these facts. If the ISPs are ever coerced into
punishing users who share files, then people will find other ways to do it -
they always have, and there are far more ways to do it now than there have ever
been. This book makes that crystal clear.

Whether this new state of affairs is legal, fair or
represents natural justice is not really the point, it IS the state of affairs.
One could suggest that the old state of affairs was unfair too. For example,
one day in 1963, four guys from Liverpool went into a studio in London for about 12 hours and recorded 12
songs. Now, over 45 years later, two of those four guys are dead; the cost of
the recording session has been recouped hundreds of thousands of times over and
the participants rewarded many many thousand fold. Somewhere north of 3 million
copies of the tracks they recorded that day have been sold worldwide. They've
been sold at premium prices for over 45+ years, yet, the "Please Please
Me" album is STILL retailing at around 8 quid (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.

Of course the standard response is that the money from the
outstandingly successful releases is used to bring through new talent. But as
this book shows, that refers to the old world, where only the record companies
had the infrastructure, know-how and media access to promote new talent. That time
is past now, as demonstrated by the ever increasing number of very successful
acts who have made it without any help from a conventional music company, but
instead have promoted themselves by viral marketing on the Internet, mobile
networks and other new channels.

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. Artists that the
"old" system served well are not happy about that, new artists and
established artists that the old system spat out and abandoned see it as
largely a good thing.

So, the "good times" referred to in the title are
shown to be a 70 year wide "window", created at first by technical
innovation, then by the smart marketing of hundreds of pioneering small companies,
then public acceptance of the new medium and success! Then came consolidation,
leading to a very few companies having a stranglehold on the music industry,
furthered by deliberate technological inertia, and - frankly - swingeing copyright
laws that are highly skewed against the music lover.

In the age of the Internet,
massive consumer choice, myriad digital communication, three computers in every
home and a dislike of large faceless corporations, there's scant support in the
world at largefor restoring that old
model - however illegal the current alternative may be."

too many trees, not enough wood
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.

THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE BOOK ABOUT THE MUSIC INDUSTRY - EVER!
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