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 American pre-war industry infighting closed down traditional radio and created an opening for country music, race records, and rock’n’roll How Hollywood bought the music industry in the 1930s - then suffocated it Why Jewish immigrants and black jazz musicians danced cheek to cheek to create the template for all popular music that followed How technology shifted the balance of power and created the big money - gramophone, radio, amplification, LPs, electric guitars, CDs, downloads Why the 'music industry' became the 'song racket', the 'singles business', and then the 'record industry'. How a formula for writing hit songs devised in the 1900s created over 50,000 of the best-known songs ever Across 28 anecdote-filled chapters, it will answer the questions about music you didn’t even know you wanted to ask. Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay will do that for you.
We are all surrounded by music: it permeates our lives but we don’t often step back and think about how it’s made, how it works, how it functions as a business. I wished I’d had the courage to tackle the whole damned thing, the story of the music industry right from the beginning - from 1713 when the British parliament gave writers the right of ownership in what they wrote, till to today, when a worldwide industry worth 100 billion pounds and originally created by Britain and America has been reduced to just three major companies - Sony, Universal and Warner - under the control of Japanese, French and Russian owners. Although it was amazingly well received I was a bit disappointed – not with the reviews but with myself. In 2002 I wrote a history of the post-war British music industry called Black Vinyl White Powder.
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