Recounts for the first time the epic story of the precipitous rise and fall of the recording industry over the past three decades, when the success of the CD turned the music business into one of the most glamorous, high-profile industries in the world--and the advent of file sharing brought it to its knees. In a fast-paced account full of larger-than-life personalities, journalist Knopper shows that, after the wealth and excess of the '80s and '90s, Sony, Warner, and the other big players brought about their own downfall through years of denial and bad decisions in the face of dramatic advances in technology. Based on interviews with more than two hundred music industry sources--from Warner Music chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr. to renegade Napster creator Shawn Fanning--Knopper is the first to offer such a detailed and sweeping contemporary history of the industry's wild ride.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 253-280) and index.

1983-1986 : Jerry Shulman's Frisbee : how the compact disc rebuilt the record business 1984-1999 : how big spenders got rich in the post-CD boom 1998-2001 : The teen-pop bubble : boy bands and Britney make the business bigger than ever but not for long 1998-2001 : a 19-year-old takes down the industry

with the help of tiny music, and a few questionable big music decisions 2002-2003 : how Steve Jobs built the iPod, revived his company and took over the music business 2003-2007 : Beating up on peer-to-peer services like Kazaa and Grokster fails to save the industry : sales plunge and Tommy Mottola abandons ship The future : how can the record labels return to the boom times? Hint : not by stonewalling new high-tech models and locking up the content.