Fred Goodman - Böcker

In 1999, when Napster made music available free online, the music industry found itself in a fight for its life. A decade later, the most important and misunderstood story—and the one with the greatest implications for both music lovers and media companies—is how the music industry has failed to remake itself. In Fortune’s Fool, Fred Goodman, the author of The Mansion on the Hill, shows how this happened by presenting the singular history of Edgar M. Bronfman Jr., the controversial heir to Seagram’s, who, after dismantling his family’s empire and fortune, made a high-stakes gamble to remake both the music industry and his own reputation. Napster had successfully blown the industry off its commercial foundations because all that the old school label heads knew how to do was record and market hits. So when Bronfman took over the Warner Music Group in 2004, his challenge was to create a new kind of record executive. Goodman finds the source of the crisis in the dissolution of the old Warner Music Group, the brilliant conglomerate of Atlantic, Elektra, and Warner Bros. Records. He shows how Doug Morris, the head of Atlantic Records, rose through the ranks and rode the CD bonanza of the 1990s to enormous corporate and personal profit before becoming embroiled in an ego-driven corporate turf war, and how all of Warner’s record executives were blindsided when AOL/Time-Warner announced in 2003 that it wanted nothing more to do with the record industry. When the music group was finally sold to Bronfman, it was a ghost of itself. Bronfman built an aggressive, streamlined team headed by Lyor Cohen, whose relentless ambition and discipline had helped build Def Jam Records. They instituted a series of daring initiatives intended to give customers legitimate online music choices and took market share from Warner’s competitors. But despite these efforts, illegal downloads still outnumber legitimate ones 19–1. Most of the talk of a new world of music and media has proven empty; despite the success of iTunes, even wildly popular sites like YouTube and MySpace have not found a way to make money with music. Instead, Warner and the other labels are diversifying and forcing young artists to give them a cut of their income from touring, publishing, and merchandising. Meanwhile, the average downloader isn’t even meeting forward-thinking musicians halfway. Each time a young band finds a following through music websites, it’s a unique story; no formula has emerged. If one does, Warner is probably in a better position than anyone to exploit it. But at the end of the day, If is the one-word verdict on Bronfman’s big bet.

When the use of Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" turned 1955's Blackboard Jungle into a teen sensation and a box-office smash, it proved the opening shot in a cinematic and cultural revolution. Starting with Elvis Presley and the teensploitation films of the '50s and '60s, in Rock on Film award-winning author and former Rolling Stone editor Fred Goodman takes readers on a wide-ranging journey through film and pop history. Along the way, he measures the transformative impact of the mid-'60s landmarks A Hard Day's Night and Dont Look Back and how they seeded an almost unbelievably broad genre of films made by increasingly ambitious musicians and filmmakers across the past seven decades.From the carefree to the complex, the mindless to the mind-bending, rock films have staked out their own turf by simultaneously celebrating innocence and challenging artistic and social conventions. With an insightful round-up of fifty must-see rock films spanning crowd-pleasers, art-house favorites, underground gems, and undisputed classics, Rock on Film surveys the nearly seventy-year canon of a genre like no other.A series of original interviews with Cameron Crowe, Jim Jarmusch, Penelope Spheeris, Taylor Hackford, and John Waters illuminates how rock has influenced the work of some of the most divergent and thoughtful directors in movie history. Illustrated throughout by more than 150 full-color and black-and-white images, Rock on Film brings the history of music in the movies to vivid life.