Simon Napier-Bell is a legend in the music business.
Not only was he the manager of The Yardbirds, T Rex,
Japan, and Wham!, and co-writer of the hit song You
Don't Have to Say You Love Me but he also wrote one of
the most lauded books ever written about post-war
British pop music, Black Vinyl, White Powder. But Simon
wasn't satisfied...He decided to tackle the whole
history of the music industry, right from the beginning;
from 1713 when the British parliament gave writers the
right of ownership in what they wrote, until to today,
when the worldwide industry is worth 100 billion pounds
and is entirely owned by the Russians, French and
Japanese. And it's brilliant. Bursting with memorable
anecdotes and the kind of witty asides that only a real
insider could make, among the many things you will learn
along the way are: How a formula for writing hit songs
devised in the 1900s created over 50,000 of the
best-known songs ever; Why the 'music industry' became
the 'song racket', the 'singles business', and then the
'record industry'. But is now the 'music industry'
again; Why Jewish immigrants and black jazz musicians
danced cheek to cheek to create the template for all
popular music that followed; How Hollywood bought the
music industry in the 1930s - then suffocated it; How
industry executives didn't realise till the 1950s that
popular music could be sold to young people, and how
they then lost their minds to the teenage market; Why
rock music turned the traditional music industry on its
head and never put it back upright again; How rap, born
from a DJs pleasant asides to his audience, became the
music of hate and rape - and the biggest selling popular
music in the world. Read Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay and you'll
never listen to music the same way again. |
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