Terry Gross, the best radio interviewer of our time in my opinion, interviews Rolling Stone contributing editor Steve Knopper about The Rise and Fall of the Music Industry. Steve’s book entitled ‘Appetite For Self-Destruction‘ chronicles the historical and cultural events that led to the music industry’s current predicament with digitally based music. 

What I really enjoyed about this interview was Steve’s thoughts on:

• Fall of Napster: Steve made a great point about how the music industry failed to leverage the best parts of Napster during its fall. Napster had about 26 million users on average and it was by far the biggest hangout for music junkies. Instead of utilizing its current stronghold on users and the community, it turned its back on it after winning the court battles.
• Suing Your Customers: I love when Steve mentioned how going after individual music downloaders was highly stupid. Not only were they the music industry’s consumers, they sued kids (down to 13 years old) and grandmothers (75 year olds). What a PR nightmare!
• Big Box Stores Control: I didn’t realize that the Wallmarts and Best Buys had a considerable amount of control on dictating music’s popularity. Though CDs were termed loss leaders (sold at highly discounted prices to just get customers to store so they would buy something else), they got the highest sale of CDs and drove the local music stores out of business.
• Business Model during CD Era: The business model became highly profitable when music was published to CDs. For over 15 years, the music industry could set the bottom line price and profit off the sales. That was said to have been the best days/years for the music industry.

Thx Dhrumil for the find!