You cant roll a joint on an iPod, the singer-songwriter Shelby Lynne told The New York Times Magazine early last year. And, O.K., I suppose thats among the iPods drawbacks. But its hard to think of an electronic device released in recent decades thats brought more pleasure to more people.
APPETITE FOR SELF-DESTRUCTION
An Excerpt From Appetite for Self-Destruction (simonsays.com)Should anyone care that in the process, the iPod has all but killed the music industry as weve known it? Maybe not, Steve Knopper writes in Appetite for Self-Destruction, his stark accounting of the mistakes major record labels have made since the end of the LP era and the arrival of digital music. These dinosaurs, he suggests, are largely responsible for their own demise.
Mr. Knopper, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, provides a wide-angled, morally complicated view of the current state of the music business. He doesnt let those rippers and burners among us that is, those who download digital songs without paying for them, and you know who you are entirely off the hook. But he suggests that with even a little foresight, record companies could have adapted to the Internets brutish and quizzical new realities and thrived.
This is a story that begins in earnest in the early 1980s, when digital music first arrived in the form of the compact disc. At first, Mr. Knopper suggests, almost everyone was frightened of these small, shiny new toys.
The labels worried about digital piracy and about refitting the factories that made vinyl LPs. Record stores didnt want to buy new sales racks. Producers worried about the effects on recording sessions, now that every footstep and door click would be audible. A group called MAD (Musicians Against Digital) quickly formed, and artists like Neil Young declared that CDs were soulless.
The mind has been tricked, Mr. Young said at the time, sounding a bit like Yoda, but the heart is sad.
The labels came around because they could jack up prices. (LPs at the time sold for about $9; most CDs went for almost twice that. ) Labels could also renegotiate contracts with artists and force customers to buy entire new album collections. According to Mr. Knopper, executives also thought it was cool watching that little drawer open and close on CD players.
Producers and artists came around, Mr. Knopper says, because the CD just sounded better than the LP, no matter how much its detractors complain to this day about losing the rich, warm analog sound. But record stores remained resistant, and thus the existence of the much loathed cardboard or plastic longboxes remember those? until the early 1990s. (The author reminds us that in the movie Defending Your Life Albert Brookss character dies as he tries to tear one open while driving.)
The CD boom lasted from 1984 to 2000, Mr. Knopper writes. Then the residue of old mistakes and a wave of new realities began hammering the music industry from all sides.
One of the first things the labels got wrong, Mr. Knopper says, was the elimination of the single. It got young people out of the habit of regularly visiting record stores and forced them to buy an entire CD to get the one song they craved. In the short term this was good business practice. In the long term it built up animosity. It was suicidal.
When Napster and other music-sharing Web sites showed up, the single came back with a vengeance. Before long MP3 the commonly used term for digitally compressed and easily traded audio files had replaced sex as the most searched-for term on sites like Yahoo! and AltaVista.
The record industry bungled the coming of Napster. Instead of striking a deal with a service that had more than 26 million users, labels sued, forcing it to close. A result, Mr. Knopper writes, was that users simply splintered, fleeing to many other file-sharing sites. That was the last chance, he declares, for the record industry as we know it to stave off certain ruin.
