Where have all the good times gone? - Louis Barfe

Louis
Barfe's elegantly written, authoritative and highly entertaining
history charts the meteoric rise and slow decline of the popular
recording industry.
Barfe shows how the 1920s and 1930s saw the departure of Edison from the
phonograph business he created and the birth of EMI and CBS. In the
years after the war, these companies, and the buccaneers, hucksters,
impresarios and con-men who ran them, reaped stupendous commercial
benefits with the arrival of Elvis Presley, who changed popular music
(and sales of popular music) overnight. After Presley came the Beatles,
when the recording industry became global and record sales reached all
time highs.
Where Have All The Good Times Gone? also charts the decline from
that high-point a generation ago. The 1990s ushered in a period of
profound crisis and uncertainty in the industry, encapsulated in one
word: Napster. Barfe shows how the almost infinite amounts of free music
available online have traumatic and disastrous consequences for an
industry that has become cautious and undynamic.