Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay: The Dodgy Business of Popular Music

2014 | Business & Finance

Simon Napier-Bell is a legend in the music business. Not only was he the manager of The Yardbirds, T Rex, Japan, and Wham!, and co-writer of the hit song You Don't Have to Say You Love Me but he also wrote one of the most lauded books ever written about post-war British pop music, Black Vinyl, White Powder. But Simon wasn't satisfied...He decided to tackle the whole history of the music industry, right from the beginning; from 1713 when the British parliament gave writers the right of ownership in what they wrote, until to today, when the worldwide industry is worth 100 billion pounds and is entirely owned by the Russians, French and Japanese. And it's brilliant. Bursting with memorable anecdotes and the kind of witty asides that only a real insider could make, among the many things you will learn along the way are: How a formula for writing hit songs devised in the 1900s created over 50,000 of the best-known songs ever; Why the 'music industry' became the 'song racket', the 'singles business', and then the 'record industry'.

But is now the 'music industry' again; Why Jewish immigrants and black jazz musicians danced cheek to cheek to create the template for all popular music that followed; How Hollywood bought the music industry in the 1930s - then suffocated it; 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 rock music turned the traditional music industry on its head and never put it back upright again; How rap, born from a DJs pleasant asides to his audience, became the music of hate and rape - and the biggest selling popular music in the world. Read Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay and you'll never listen to music the same way again.

Simon Napier-Bell (Author)