Beatmixed

From the sounds of the Ars Technica review, Steve Knopper’s new book, Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age, sounds fantastic. What music lover won’t appreciate a nice simile comparing big music to a boil that needs cleaning?

“I realized that as an industry we’d kind of been smoking crack,” said Universal exec Barney Wragg, after leaving the label in 2005. (Wragg took a job as head of digital music at EMI the next year.)

And James Mercer, the lead singer of indie band the Shins, was even more blunt. “You see these articles about the disaster in the music business,” he said. “When you think about how unhealthy the business has been, this is like lancing the fucking boil and cleaning it out. It’s not a fucking disaster to regular bands out there.”