"Rock On" by Dan Kennedy, is one heckuva funny book. Kennedy describes his tour year stint as a marketing puke at Atlantic Records in 2002 while the company goes through massive turmoil as the music industry heads into the biggest slump in its history. Kennedy is a mid-30's slacker coming to grips with the idea of even having a career, let alone what he thinks could be a dream job in the rock and roll business. But rock & roll fantasy quickly gives way to boring staff meetings, mediocrity, internal politics, layoffs and a fundamentally broken business model. Somehow Kennedy manages to keep a hilarious internal dialog going with himself as he assesses and re-assesses what's wrong with the music business.
Here's a short excerpt where Kennedy is about to give a presentation to senior level execs in the company as he gets introduced by a VP who was famous for signing the Canadian band Rush in the 1970s' and is christened Rush Hair by Kennedy.
I grab a seat at the conference table just in time. These two enter the room in a sensible fasion. They set up their PowerPoint. Rush Hair is already here. He gets up and tells the strangest story about how kids don't even go to records stores anymore, and how they're, get this, downloading music from the Internet these days. Rush Hair tells us that the problem with this is that it's killing the industry, because... well, partially because the biggest selection of online music resides on illegal networks where people get it for free since the legal options are still scant, to put it mildly. And even if people use the legal downloading option of the iTunes Music Store, it means they can download single tracks for a buck a pop, which basically means the industrycan't sell a CD with only two or three good songs on it and get twenty bucks for it. I mean, this is never said out loud in our little family. I mean, maybe that kind of thing is said aloud in the upper reaches of the company, but down here it's all kind of one big elephant in the room.
"We are really excited about trying to figure out a way to sell albums online. This is a really exciting time. It's a challenging time, but it's an exciting time. And these gentlemen are here to give us a sneak preview of just how we might go about moving forward," says Rush Hair.
He goes on to tell the story of how dangerous it is that kids are downloading from Limeware and these different peer-to-peer networks. He gives the example of coming home to find his daughters downloading music illegally on the Internet and seeing pornographic pictures on the same network. Note to self: apparently there is also free pornography on the peer-to-peer networks people use to illegally download music. Dude, seriously?
It's a fast read and you can see the fundamental problem with the record business as clear as an iceberg off in the horizon. Kennedy doesn't really offer a ton of suggestions beyond the obvious, but it's still a fun read. That said, the last 40 pages after the story's climax could have been left out.
- Amazon: Rock On
- Rock On: Official site, Backstory, Reading group guide, Blog
Comments