Nobody seems to understand the music business - from Payola, to iPods, to Little Richard to Richard Branson. With his book Dirty Little Secrets of the Record Business: Why So Much Music You Hear Sucks, one brave soul, Hank Bordowitz, has nobly attempted to transpose the Byzantine mechanizations of the powerhouse music industry into a palatable text for public consumption, supposedly thereby revealing why the music industry is able to produce and distribute so much disappointing music. While succeeding in conveying the information in a digestible way, Bordowitz fails in meeting the expectations promised in the title.
The book is well ndash;researched. It rsquo;s mostly easy to follow. And yet after reading it, I honestly don rsquo;t feel like I am any closer to knowing why most of the music I hear sucks (other than my own biased opinion).
I now know how sucky music is produced, marketed, distributed, and consumed. But I still don rsquo;t know why the music is made in the first place. This is what I want to know.
Why are bands that are so clearly terrible able to make a career out of being so terrible?
Sure, the music business is complicated and broad and Bordowitz covers it well. You rsquo;ve got your production, your distribution, your marketing, your radio, your music video and most importantly, you have your consumer.
And that, I would wager to guess, is where the blame for most of the music I hear sucking lies and where, unfortunately, Bordowitz is hesitant to lay any of the blame. Yes, record companies want me to listen to whatever they want to sell me, but I realized a long time ago that I don rsquo;t have to buy, listen to, or even be aware of their crap. It is a conscious choice and it begins with switching off the radio and the music video and making an effort to seek what you like and find out about more of the same.
Bordowitz made the unfortunate decision to include a lot of numbers within the text of the book. I wanted this book to enthrall me with some sort of revealing insight, but instead, I got math. Math!
Numbers can be effective to illustrate a point, but when I start to see numbers too often, I just tune out. True, the music business is indeed a business and is consequently a slave to the ever-important ldquo;bottom-line, rdquo; but using far-reaching (and admittedly simplistic) economic analyses to support the thesis of ldquo;why so much music you hear sucks rdquo; hardly seems effective or really even necessary, not to mention not very ldquo;rock and roll rdquo;.
Perhaps a better route to take would be to analyze how or why a mediocre (my opinion, yes) band like the Strokes received such a huge initial marketing and media push a few years back, when they ended up being relatively disappointing in just about every way.
I do not blame The Strokes for this. They make music. Somebody else tried to make The Strokes a culturally penetrating fad.
Who was this person and why? That rsquo;s what I wanted to get from this book. Sadly, I was left wanting.
I admire Bordowitz s efforts, but at times he feels like an apologist insider writing what he thought would be an incredibly informative and insightful book. While succeeding at the former, he fails in the latter, simply because it lacks the venom that the title claims is lurking beneath the cover. I was really itching to learn what Bordowitz rsquo;s personal feelings on the music business are.
The reality is that most of the material that Bordowitz relates is neither remarkably controversial, nor very subjective. I was hoping to get the music industry expose version of Upton Sinclair rsquo;s The Jungle. I wanted to visualize the slippery guts of the music industry strewn across the kill room floor as Bordowitz pointed out the disgusting gristly truths hidden therein.
Instead the gears are carefully taken apart, separated into little pieces and carefully explained as they are shined and put back together.
Dirty Little Secrets is worthy of reading for anyone wanting to get to know the inner workings of the whole of the record business, which may indeed have been Bordowitz s original purpose. The book itself is relatively complete -- and occasionally fascinating -- in this regard.
Who knows why this title was chosen? Possibly for sensationalistic purposes. But anyone who is ready to roll up their sleeves and dig deeper into why music does, in fact, suck, may come away feeling disappointed and just a little duped.
News RSS