Steve Knopper, Author of Appetite for Self Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age

May 30, 2009

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors! The next guest on my show is perfect for the title of this show, of course. Usually I’m interviewing authors, three authors per show and one musician, and what’s fun about this book is that it hits both. Author Steve Knopper is the author of Appetite for Self Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. Welcome to the show. Do I have Steve on the line? I think we’re having some technical difficulties. Do I have Steve on the line?

Steve Knopper: Yeah, I’m here, can you hear me? Hello?

Dr. Kent: Now I can hear you, how’re you doing?

Steve Knopper: Can you hear me now?

Dr. Kent: Yep, I can hear you.

Steve Knopper: Sorry, ok.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about this book. Most people go into a CD shop, and they don’t think much about this, but as someone who is in the publishing end, music world, I’ve seen a lot of things change, as you certainly have. Tell us about the changes that have happened.

Steve Knopper: Yeah, absolutely. My book is on, it’s a chronology, and it begins with, it’s basically tells the story of the record industry, sort of the rise and fall. It begins with the adoption of the CD in the early 80’s, and it goes through that period when everybody was replacing their record collections from cheap vinyl LPs to more expensive CDs. And there was a huge boom in the industry, and everybody got real rich until about 1999 or 2000, and then Napster came along, and everybody got their music for free after that, and it kind of destroyed the whole model of selling CDs. Then iTunes happened, and really the record industry has been shrinking and crashing and struggling ever since.

Dr. Kent: What are some of the industry’s big mistakes. There’s so many, and it’s one after the other that we hear about and sort of laugh about. The famous one, of course is the 8-track, which wasn’t a mistake, but now it’s kind of something that we laugh about. So tell us about some of the funny stories.

Steve Knopper: Sure. I have a series of small chapters in the book called Big Musics, Big Mistakes. And they’re separate (inaudible). The first one is the CD longbacks. Remember that cardboard thing that you had to buy in order to get the CD, you had to tear this thing open and get blisters all over your fingers and so forth. That was actually created because record retailers like The Towers of the World were initially resistant to the CD, and they came after the industry basically said you don’t have to rebuild your LP racks, which would have cost a lot of money. So they created these cardboard things, side by side they were about the same width as a vinyl LP. So that was a big one, another one that I mention is killing the single. By the late 90’s, part of the reason Napster was so effective was that people were just kind of sick of having to go out and buy $18.00 CD’s that had one or two good songs on them. Napster came along right at that time, and it allowed people to cherry pick the singles they wanted for free, and then iTunes later allowed you to do it for just 99 cents. That destroyed that whole business model of selling an $18.00 CD as the only format.

Dr. Kent: And how is it, it’s such an interesting thing, now that there’s interactions directly with musicians, and musicians will put their own record labels together, and put their own music out, and this and that. Is the record industry even breathing?

Steve Knopper: Yeah, the record industry still is. Basically when we have heard of the record industry we’re more or less thinking before major record labels. Sony, DMG, Warner, Universal and EMI. And those companies are huge companies that have a lot of overhead, they have a lot of payments to make, a lot of high executive salaries. So they’re carrying a lot of freight, and they’re not doing that well with their own problems, their own business model problems. Then the economy is really giving that a hit as well. So these companies are shrinking, shrinking, they’re laying off people left and right, they’re finding it harder and harder to discover new talent and market that new talent, although that’s still going on to an extent. The question is, how that’s going to affect artists. Sort of the glass empty way of looking at it is, it’s much more difficult for the artist to take that traditional path, sign to a major record label, use its connections to get on the radio, and become a huge star. But I think the glass half full thing, which is sort of what I believe, is that no longer do you even need a major label for a lot of this stuff. You can use MySpace and Face Book and YouTube, and all these different ways of do it yourself marketing that didn’t even exist 10 or 15 years ago. Maybe you won’t turn into Beyonce, but you can still eeke out a decent living as an act if you have talent and you’re willing to put a little work into the marketing.

Dr. Kent: It’s so much fun thinking about the rise of a company like Apple and the iTunes thing. It’s so iconic. Tell me about some other iconic moments in history.

Steve Knopper: Sure. Again, Napster was sort of the most iconic of all dirt in this kind of profit, in this progression. Napster came along, everybody knew Napster, used it, millions of people were on this thing, after Shawn Fanning invented it in 1999, and it’s become kind of a symbol, when you look back, of two things. More negatively, it’s a symbol of piracy. It’s a symbol of people being able to get all their music illegally for free, and copyright infringement and all that stuff. But I think, as I say in the book, it’s also a positive legacy, or symbol as well because it showed the opportunity of the new digital business model, the new online, very convenient way of getting music where you didn’t have to go to stores and spend all that money on a CD. So therefore I think that Napster was really a major crossroads at the time. I argue in my book that the record labels at the time had a chance to make a deal with Napster, and they should have done so, but chose not to.

Dr. Kent: Is it all about money? Is all of what drives the market, is it ever what a consumer wants necessarily? It seems that Napster was, but are any of the decisions made by consumers and not money makers?

Steve Knopper: Yeah, everything in major business is all about money. That’s true in the music business as well. And you’re absolutely right, during that time period beginning in the late 90’s, even before Napster internet music was seen as an opportunity by some people in the music business. But others, higher up in the business, who had been selling CD’s a certain way for a long, long time, and then before that final LP (inaudible) and gotten incredibly rich in the process. They really had no interest in changing the business model and looking at the fork in the road, and taking the fork and going in the completely new technological direction. And that’s true of many industries. We certainly saw it with newspapers, we’re seeing it now with the auto industry. If it works, people don’t want to change it, but that’s why you have to hire high tech people and listen to them. And that’s where the record industry went wrong, is that they actually did have a lot of very credible high tech experts on their staff, very experienced people in both marketing departments and the new media, and the strategic department. All the labels had lots of people like that. But in the end the business affairs people and the people at the head of these labels didn’t listen to them and they just sort of poo-poohed them, and they went on their way selling CD’s and they wound up paying a major price for that decision.

Dr. Kent: I was the kind of guy when I was in college that was a little CD obsessed. I remember so many people of my music-philic friends who had whole walls of their house devoted to CD’s. Then talking through the years with folks, there’s still people that have whole walls full of LP’s. You can’t really have a whole wall full of mp3’s.

Steve Knopper: Yes, that’s true. I’m the same as you, I’m 40 years old, so I grew up right during that time. I was in high school and college, right during that time when they were in that changeover from LP’s and CD’s, caught the tail end of getting obsessed with buying LP’s and having a big collection, and then obviously kind of grew up with CD’s and doing the same. Yeah, I’m actually looking right now at my wall of CD’s, and I really like it, and I like that physical way of collecting records, and it’s sad to me that that’s a relic, that it’s kind of going out of style. But on the other hand, you’re right to make the point that there’s something romantic that’s lost, because you can’t have wall of mp3’s. But the iPod is pretty cool. It’s pretty iconic, and I think if you’re a college student who’s grown up and come of age with music over the last 10 years, I think that you’re going to feel just as warmly and just as nostalgic as we do for CD’s about that moment when you got your first iPod, and you looked on it, and you realized you could carry 10, 20, 30, 40,000 of your favorite songs and play whatever one you want, and that’s a very, very powerful and cool idea. So I do a lot of these interviews, and a lot of people bring up the same point, which is isn’t there something lost. The physical collection going out, isn’t there something lost? I think that’s true, but I also think that you have to look at the flip side of it as well, which is something really that’s gained.

Dr. Kent: And one thing that I’ve started to do is one people jettison their old record collections, I like to record my vinyl into my iPod. I’m a big iPod freak too, and I’ve actually revived the classic feelings and the kids really can feel like they’re connected to that music, because it’s so diverse, and you can put anything in there, live shows, live shows have been revived again. So talk about how has the music itself changed? Because what’s interesting is you talk about the industry kind of scrambling and trying to figure out what to do, what have musicians done? And I know part of that is in how they can release live shows and things that they might not have done before because they had to print 10,000 copies, or something like that.

Steve Knopper: I think that’s a really excellent point. I think you’re talking more about what established musicians can do as far as getting out different types of outside material, and stuff like that. There are a lot of ways of doing that, if the musicians are willing, than there were even 10 years ago. There’s YouTube. When YouTube first started, as you remember, before the real copyright issues really kicked in, the stuff that you could see on YouTube was basically the entire history of music on video and DVD and VHS and TV, was right there, right in front of you for free, and that was a really cool moment. For fans, not necessarily for people who have the rights for that stuff. But still, you can go on YouTube and find all kinds of really interesting stuff. Live recordings, there’s another site that’s not totally supported by the original artists, there’s a little bit of controversy there, but there’s this site called Wolfgang’s Vault, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but they basically bought all the rights to the old King Biscuit radio shows, and also to Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium recordings from the 60’s all the way up, and there is some fascinating stuff in there. My two favorite artists to buy bootlegs of are Bruce Springsteen and Who, and there’s a lot of amazing material for both of those artists there. So this whole internet thing has kind of broken open a dam. I was actually just on a panel at South Heights Southwest last week, and one of my fellow panelists was Kim Quirk, who used to be in the band Too Much Joy, and is now with Rhapsody, and he made the point that when Napster came out, he thought there was no one who could be a bigger Clash fan that him. He had all, no on could go deeper into the Clashions catalog than he could. He thought he was as deep as he could possibly get with rare Clash and Joe Strummer recordings, and he said when Napster came out he realized ok, I’m going (inaudible). So I think that’s dated in and of itself. Obviously he has some more complex opinions about was Napster a good or a bad thing. But I think that sort of sums it up in a nutshell, that this sort of internet stuff is a real opportunity for precisely the type of chance that you’re talking about.

Dr. Kent: And you know, an interesting thing that I’ve found is that a lot of musicians that are sort of the octogenarian crowd, a lot of them are resistant to some of this stuff, but a good number of them say you know what, if I’d have had this when I was a kid, man, it would havd made everything so much easier. As a musician, and I see, even my students, with their iPods, I’m amazed how much variety of music they get and how educated they are about music.

Steve Knopper: Yeah, I spoke to a high school class here in Colorado where I live a few weeks ago, and I walk in to talk about the record business, and as I walked in a couple kids were arguing at their desks, they must have been 16 or 17, about whether or not Robert Johnson actually sold his soul to the devil. I hear that often. I’m a huge Robert Johnson blues fan, and so I actually, we all go, all the music fans, rock music or pop music, go through this process of, “Oh, I heard the Rolling Stones hit, where did that come from?” So you go back and look through the Muddy Waters and Howard Wolf, and then you go back and listen to Robert Johnson. You just keep going back, and you learn all this stuff, and you and I when were kids buying CD’s and LP’s, the only way to do that was to raise some money and keep making these trips back and forth to the record store. Which on one hand is awesome, you know. It’s just a great rite of passage thing as a kid. But there’s a great power to be able to just do all that stuff at your computer. You know, iTunes certainly enabled you to do that, and streaming services like MySpace now, and Rhapsody. Not everything’s out there, but it probably will be, and very soon. If it were 1980-whatever, and I was 14 and I was sitting in front of my computer going, “Wow, I can do that whole process and go back as far as I want, just by sitting here for an hour,” I think that’s an incredibly powerful thing, and it just supports music enthusiasm across the board, and I think that’s good.

Dr. Kent: So was Napster kind of like the audio YouTube? I have several colleagues that always talk about, “Why is there no YouTube for audio?”

Steve Knopper: Yeah, well, that’s a complicated, that’s a really good question there, it’s got a complicated answer. The YouTube for audio, music, audio recordings from the time of Napster had issues, legal issues, involving who has the rights to that. Obviously all these things were fought in the courts, who has the rights to various songs, and various audio recordings. And that was really meticulously wrangled through in various court decisions involving Napster, and all these different other places. But then, when YouTube popped around, I guess it was 2004 and 2005, people realized that they really hadn’t gone through that same discussion for music video. Kind of the difference between music video and audio is that you can dowload audio really easily, and it’s leading to a mass huge collection of songs for free, and illegally, as you know. But it’s a little bit more difficult to do that for video, and so YouTube became kind of a middle ground option where you can rent all this stuff by streaming it on the YouTube website, but you can’t actually buy it and own it. So, that was a long winded way of saying it’s just two different things. The YouTube for audio right now is being worked out. Rhapsody is one answer to your question, you can go to that website pay twelve bucks a month, and you can stream whatever song you want, but you can’t really own it. Another example that’s kind of developing is MySpace music. I never thought MySpace music was that big a deal, but just in the last few weeks I realize that all kinds of records are out there for free streaming basically. There’s like 27 YouTube albums on there, there’s the new Kelly Clarkson on there, there’s all kind of stuff on MySpace you can get. (inaudible) So the answer to your question is it’s developing. So sorry I got a little complicated there.

Dr. Kent: So tell us, in closing here, I mean I could talk with you for hours about this, I love it. How’d you get into this, and obviously the book’s done very well by you, and how did you get into this and come up with this one?

Steve Knopper: Well, basically I’ve been covering the music business a long time. I started out just by being a music writer and a music critic. I became a freelancer in 1996 and I realized that everybody was writing about music. I wanted to write a record review for a major magazine, I had to compete with a billion people. But if I wanted to do a news story about the music business, and interview 20 people, it’s a little bit harder to do that, but then the competition among people who can do that exact thing is not as much. And it’s easier to find story ideas that no one else is pitching. So that’s sort of how I got into it, and I originally wrote for Billboard, and then I wrote for Spin, and now I write for Rolling Stone about the same topic. I had done a piece for Wired a couple years ago about trying to kill my computer with viruses. Basically just clicking on all the stuff you’re not supposed to click on, and downloading all the spam stuff. I wounded it pretty well, and the story ran and got some attention. And someone from New York called me and asked if I had any book ideas. And then the story gets kind of long and drawn out, but the short answer is I sent him ten ideas and he liked one of them, and eventually we had a book deal.

Dr. Kent: It’s wonderful, I love it. The fascinating thing about it is that you come to all of this from I think a really fresh perspective. We’re so used to hearing, “Oh, that damn MySpace,” or you’ll hear it from the other end, “Oh, iTunes has really changed the whole world, and it’s so perfect, and everyone has such a tact. And so I think what you’ve done brilliantly is sort of bring everyone together and tell the whole history.

Steve Knopper: Well thank you very much, that’s what I realize is that nobody had actually really told the story from the perspective of the people involved. I interviewed something like 280 people for this book, and they were the people who were right there in it, negotiating, and I realized no one had done kind of a journalism book, kind of like what you just said, kind of fleshing out exactly what you just said. People basically know what happened, but not too many people know the inside details of what happened, and that was my goal, and I’m just really gratified that people seem to like it.

Dr. Kent: Well, it’s so cool. So where can we find your writing online, do you have a site?

Steve Knopper: Yeah, I do, I have a website. It’s KNOPPS.com. My last name is Knopper, so that’s my long time nickname.

Dr. Kent: Well, Knopps.com, and we can check out all of his writing and I hope that also the piece from wired is up there somewhere? I gotta go check that out. The book is called Appetite for Self Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. You gotta pick this book up. Thank you so much for chatting with me.

Steve Knopper: Thank you for having me, I enjoyed it.

Dr. Kent: All right, my next guest on the show has an extraordinary tale to tell, Terry Healey wrote a book called At Face Value, and it’s really unbelievable the story that he has to tell us throughout more than 30 surgeries on his face, and has an incredible life story to tell. Come on back for that in just a minute.

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