Michael: Kevin, what’s the most romantic, artistic part of the music business for you? The lone songwriter pouring their heart out? Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. The tortured genius in a dimly lit room, a guitar, a notebook... creating something purely from emotion. That’s the magic of it. Michael: Well, prepare to be disillusioned. Because according to our book today, the entire industry was built on legal loopholes, bribery, and guys who saw songs as just another commodity to be manufactured and sold, like soap or sausages. Kevin: Sausages? Come on. That's a bit cynical, even for you. Michael: I'm just channeling the spirit of the book we're diving into today, Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay: The Business of Popular Music by Simon Napier-Bell. Kevin: Simon Napier-Bell... that name sounds familiar. He’s not just some historian, is he? Michael: Not even close. This is the guy who managed The Yardbirds, Marc Bolan, and even took Wham! on their groundbreaking tour of China. He co-wrote the massive hit 'You Don't Have To Say You Love Me.' He is an absolute insider, and his core argument, which is both praised and seen as a bit controversial by readers, is that the music business has always been, first and foremost, a business. The art is just the raw material. Kevin: Wow. Okay, so this is the view from inside the machine. I have a feeling this is going to shatter a few of my illusions. Where does a story like that even begin? Michael: It begins not in a recording studio, but in a courtroom. It all starts with the moment a song stopped being just a performance and became property.

Michael: The whole story kicks off with something incredibly boring but monumentally important: the Statute of Anne in 1710 in Britain. It was the world's first real copyright law. For the first time, a written work, including musical notation, could be legally owned. Kevin: A law from 1710? How does that possibly lead to The Beatles or Beyoncé? Michael: Because once you can own something, you can sell it. And that gave birth to the first music publishers. Their product wasn't a performance; it was paper. Sheet music. And the game became: how do you sell as much paper as possible? This leads to one of the first great hustlers of the music business, a guy named Charles K. Harris. Kevin: Okay, I'm listening. A 19th-century music mogul? Michael: Exactly. In the 1890s, Harris wrote a song called 'After the Ball'. He sold it to a publisher and his first royalty check was for a measly 85 cents. He was furious. So he decided to publish the song himself. But how do you get people to buy your sheet music? You have to make the song a hit. Kevin: And how do you do that without radio or records? Michael: You create your own promotion machine. Harris pioneered what were called "plugging" tactics. He would hire "pluggers"—basically singers—to go into department stores, bars, and theaters and just sing the song over and over again to drum it into the public's ears. His most effective trick was bribing famous vaudeville singers to add 'After the Ball' to their set. He’d pay them cash and put their picture on the cover of the sheet music. Kevin: Hold on. So you're telling me the first million-selling hit was basically promoted with bribes? That sounds... incredibly modern. It's 19th-century payola! Michael: It's the exact same principle! He was paying for plays. The song itself was a classic tearjerker, a waltz about a misunderstanding at a ball that leads to a lifetime of regret. It was engineered to be emotional and memorable. The song was the software, the sheet music was the hardware, and the business was about moving units. 'After the Ball' sold over two million copies of sheet music in its first year. Kevin: That's staggering. So from the very beginning, it wasn't about the most artistic song winning. It was about the best-marketed song winning. Michael: Precisely. And that’s the "original sin," if you will. The moment music became a commodity, the machinery of promotion became more important than the art itself. This set the stage for everything that followed, because once you have a product, the next step is to build a bigger, better machine to sell it.

Kevin: Okay, so the industry is built on selling paper. But then technology comes along and completely upends that. The phonograph must have terrified the sheet music publishers. Michael: It was an earthquake. Thomas Edison's invention meant that for the first time, a performance could be captured, duplicated, and sold. It wasn't just about the notes on a page anymore; it was about a specific artist's voice, a specific band's sound. This created a new power player: the record label. Kevin: And a whole new set of problems, I'm guessing. If a song is played on a record in a restaurant, who gets paid? The person who wrote the song? The person who sang it? The record company? Michael: You've just hit on the central conflict of the 20th-century music business. And it led to the creation of the industry's great gatekeepers. The first was ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, formed in 1914. The whole thing was kicked off by a composer named Victor Herbert. He was dining in a fancy New York restaurant, Shanley's, and the house orchestra started playing one of his songs. Kevin: Let me guess, he didn't get a royalty check with his dinner. Michael: He got nothing, and he was furious. So he sued. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the court ruled that any public performance of music for profit—even just to create a nice atmosphere for diners—required a license and a royalty payment. It was a landmark victory. Kevin: Wow. So that one lawsuit created the entire system of performance royalties we have today? Michael: It laid the groundwork. ASCAP became the collection agency, a powerful union for songwriters and publishers. But here's the catch: it was an incredibly exclusive club. They were the Tin Pan Alley establishment. They looked down on new, "vulgar" forms of music. They wouldn't let in blues artists, or jazz musicians, or hillbilly country singers. Kevin: So they created a vacuum. All this music that people actually wanted to listen to was being ignored by the official gatekeepers. Michael: A massive vacuum. And into that vacuum stepped the radio broadcasters. They were sick of paying ASCAP's ever-increasing fees for a limited catalog of music. So, in 1939, they did something radical: they formed their own competing society, BMI—Broadcast Music, Inc. Kevin: A rival gatekeeper. Michael: Exactly. And BMI's strategy was simple: they welcomed everyone ASCAP had rejected. They signed the blues artists from the Mississippi Delta, the country singers from Nashville, the Latin musicians, the early R&B acts. They built a massive catalog of the very music that was bubbling up from the grassroots of America. Kevin: This sounds like a corporate turf war. Michael: It was an all-out war. In 1941, ASCAP pulled all its music from the radio, thinking it would cripple the broadcasters. They assumed the public would demand their familiar hits. But a funny thing happened: nobody really cared. They were perfectly happy listening to all the fresh, exciting music BMI was providing. The ASCAP boycott failed spectacularly. Kevin: That's incredible. So a conflict born out of corporate greed accidentally blew the doors open for all these marginalized genres. Michael: It's one of the great ironies in music history. The fight between ASCAP and BMI is arguably the single most important business event that paved the way for rock 'n' roll. It gave a platform to the very sounds that would eventually conquer the world. The machine was built, the gates were thrown open, and now it was time for the kings to take their thrones.

Michael: So by the 1970s, the machine is fully built. It's a global, multi-billion dollar industry. And it's being run by some of the most brilliant, powerful, and frankly, unhinged executives you can imagine. Kevin: Forget the rock stars trashing hotel rooms. You're saying the real chaos was in the boardrooms? Michael: Oh, far more. Napier-Bell dedicates a lot of time to these larger-than-life figures. Take Walter Yetnikoff, the head of CBS Records in the 70s and 80s. He was infamous. He decided, almost on a whim, to declare "war" on his main rival, Warner Bros. Records. He even had banners printed up for a sales conference that said, "Fuck Warner. Fuck the Bunny," referring to the Bugs Bunny logo. Kevin: You're kidding me. That's not a business strategy, that's a playground taunt! Michael: It was pure ego. And it led to абсолютное безумие. He heard that Warner's star artist, James Taylor, might be available. So he gets him into a meeting and offers him a massive contract. When Taylor hesitates, Yetnikoff literally locks him in the office and refuses to let him out until he signs. He held him there for ten hours. Kevin: That's not a negotiation, that's a hostage situation! What does that do to the music? Are they even talking about the art at that point? Michael: The art is irrelevant. It's about acquisition. It's about winning. In retaliation, the head of Warner, Mo Ostin, poached Paul Simon from CBS. So Yetnikoff vows to destroy Paul Simon's career. It's a personal vendetta funded by millions of corporate dollars. This culture of excess and ego defined the era. It's the same culture that produced the legendary rock tours. Kevin: Right, like the famous Van Halen story, where they demanded a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed. I always just wrote that off as peak rock star entitlement. Michael: And that's the common misconception. Napier-Bell presents it as something else entirely. Van Halen's stage show was enormous, with complex lighting rigs and tons of equipment. It was potentially very dangerous if not set up correctly. Their contract rider was like a phone book, filled with technical specifications. Kevin: Okay, so where do the M&Ms come in? Michael: They buried the "no brown M&Ms" clause deep in the middle of all the technical jargon. It was a test. If they walked backstage and saw brown M&Ms in the bowl, they knew the promoter hadn't read the contract carefully. And if they missed that tiny detail, what else did they miss? Was the rigging that was holding tons of equipment over their heads installed correctly? Trashing the dressing room wasn't just a tantrum; it was a signal to force a line-by-line safety check of the entire production. Kevin: Wow. That's... actually genius. It's a crazy, destructive, but brilliant quality control check. It perfectly captures the era—total chaos, but with a strange, underlying logic to it. Michael: Exactly. It's the perfect metaphor for the business itself. On the surface, it's all sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. But underneath, it's a high-stakes game of contracts, power, and money, run by men who were part genius, part monster.

Michael: So when you pull it all together, from a 1710 copyright law to a bowl of M&Ms, Napier-Bell's argument is crystal clear: the popular music we love is the end result of a messy, ruthless, and often brilliant compromise between art and commerce. Kevin: It is kind of disillusioning, but in a way, it's also more interesting. It’s not just magic that happens in a studio. It's a massive, complicated machine built by hustlers, lawyers, inventors, and geniuses. And it makes you wonder, with streaming and AI and TikTok completely changing the game now, what's the next chapter of this story? Michael: That's the billion-dollar question, isn't it? The technology changes, the gatekeepers change, but that fundamental tension between the song and the business of selling the song... that seems to be eternal. Kevin: It really makes you listen to your favorite songs a little differently. You start thinking about the deals, the promotion, the sheer hustle that had to happen for that piece of art to even reach your ears. Michael: And that’s the power of a book like this. It doesn't diminish the art, but it adds this whole other layer of appreciation for the wild, incredible business that brings it to us. Kevin: We'd love to hear what you all think. Does knowing the business behind the music change how you feel about it? Does it make it more or less magical? Find us on our socials and join the conversation. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.