Appetite for Self-Destruction

Steve Knopper, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, tells the story of the rise and fall of the recording industry across three decades, and argues that the fall was largely self-inflicted. The compact disc, he recounts, turned the music business into one of the most glamorous and high-profile industries in the world, and the wealth of the 1980s and 1990s followed from it. The publisher's account of the book holds that the major labels then brought about their own decline through years of denial and poor decisions in the face of dramatic advances in technology, and that the industry was asleep at the wheel from the moment file sharing began to change how music reached listeners in the 1990s. The narrative runs from the birth of the compact disc through the boom in CD sales, the arrival of Napster, the confidential talks that led to iTunes, and on to collapsing sales, moving between boardrooms, studios, garage computer labs and corporate infighting. The book rests on interviews with more than two hundred people in and around the industry, and is offered as a cautionary tale for the digital age.

Written from the publisher's own description page at Simon and Schuster.

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