APPETITE FOR SELF-DESTRUCTION: THE SPECTACULAR CRASH OF THE RECORD INDUSTRY
IN THE DIGITAL AGE
By Steve Knopper. Free Press. 301 pp. $29.99
***1/2

The first surprise in Steve Knopper’s book Appetite for Self-Destruction, a lively account of the stunning collapse of the record industry and the rise of online music, is that it begins a whole lot earlier than you expect it to — in 1979, to be exact, when Knopper argues that Chicago DJ Steve Dahl nearly put the major labels out of business.

Dahl, you see, was the man who spearheaded the “disco sucks” movement and organized the famous mass burning of disco records at Comiskey Park. In the massive disco backlash that followed, record sales dried up practically overnight, stores returned millions of unsold LPs, and the major labels (which had invested heavily in the disco craze) either cut back on staff or went out of business entirely.

“This business model based on selling pieces of plastic has been on its last legs for nearly 30 years,” says Knopper, who has been covering the music industry for Rolling Stone since 2002. The labels have just been lucky enough to have gotten bailed out a couple of times by one fluky phenomenon or another: Michael Jackson and MTV came along in the early ’80s, the CD rescued them again in the late ’80s, and the boy band craze kept them afloat into the new century. But with online musical downloads (both legal and illegal) taking over, it doesn’t look like the cavalry is riding to the rescue this time.

“Back in 1991, It seemed like CDs were going to be around forever,” Knopper says, “but in retrospect, it seems like CDs were an artificial extension of a model that was on its way out. It was almost an accidental rescue — it certainly wasn’t as if the labels were being high-tech visionaries.”

That’s putting it mildly: while there were a few forward-thinking junior executives at the labels who recognized the implications of the rise of file-sharing services like Napster, the people making the decisions tended to be too technologically backward to understand the nature of the Napster threat, and too unimaginative to turn the power of the Internet to their own advantage. Indeed, there seems to be something deep in the DNA of label execs from a certain generation that absolutely resists the idea of giving anything away for free — or even for cheap.

“The history of music retail over the last 10 years has been an endless demand from consumers for labels to lower their prices,” Knopper

says. “You see it now at Best Buy or on Amazon, of course — just a couple of weeks ago, Amazon’s ‘deal of the day’ was Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True, one of my favourite records ever, for $1.98. And I don’t think the labels are very enthusiastically marching down that road, but they’re certainly being driven there.

“There are a lot anecdotes that reveal the thinking at the major labels — for instance, I tell the story of Syd Schwartz, who helped break Creed online for the independent Wind-Up Records by releasing MP3s online. He then moved to EMI, which is a major label, where he was told, ‘We don’t do that stuff around here.’”

Knopper periodically interrupts the book with his list of “Big Music’s Big Mistakes” — it’s a roll call of infamous blunders and PR disasters that includes the CD longbox, the rise of the big-box stores, and, perhaps most destructive of all, Sony BMG’s “rootkit” software, the files embedded on several of their CDs that were supposed to prevent online piracy but which often merely destroyed people’s computers instead. Knopper even pinpoints the exact date when, in his view, the record industry bungled their last chance to survive the online era: July 15, 2000, when the major labels failed to reach a deal to merge with Napster.

We’re still living with the fallout from that decision, Knopper says: with the labels unable to get on top of online music distribution, the bulk of music downloads were done either through iTunes (which makes a tidy profit for Steve Jobs, but not so much for the labels) or illegally.

“I actually think the future of music looks very good for consumers and artists, both big and small,” Knopper says. “It doesn’t look so good for major record labels. I do like the record industry and feel some sympathy for them, but having lived through the ’90s just as a consumer, I was also incredibly frustrated that the labels weren’t seeing what everyone else was seeing. In 2001, when you wanted to download a song, just purely for convenience, not even as a thief, the only way to do it was illegally!

“I hope it comes across in the book that I am anti-copyright infringement. It’s not right to be able to basically break all the locks off the record stores and steal all the music. It’s not moral. But it’s hard — I recently bought that book, The Pitchfork 500, which is a list of the 500 greatest songs of the last 30 years, and because I’m an obsessive collector guy, I’m trying to get them all. I’ve been scouring iTunes and eMusic and records stores and I’ve got about half. Then I went to [the online filesharing hub] The Pirate Bay and did a search for ‘Pitchfork 500’ — just to see. And of course, there they all are, in one torrent. I swear to God, I had this moment where I literally had to pull my hand off the mouse, to not make that one click.”

He chuckles ruefully, perhaps picturing the same lopsided moral struggle taking place in front of laptops all over the world. “The record industry has a big problem.”