From rock to crock

Original Rockers. By Richard King. Faber & Faber; 252 pages; £18.99.

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy. By Stephen Witt. Viking; 296 pages; $27.95. Bodley Head; £20.

TWO months ago Geoff Barrow, the instrumentalist for Portishead, an award-winning British rock group, revealed on Twitter that 34m streams of his music had earned him precisely £1,700 ($2,604) after tax. He sarcastically applauded Apple, YouTube and Spotify, and his record label, Universal, for “selling our music so cheaply”. Some have quibbled with Mr Barrow’s figures, but no one has suggested the band has earned more than a tenth of a penny for each song streamed. What is more, few artists achieve Portishead’s level of success, which suggests that writing music has become a lousy way to make a living. Two new books present differing explanations of how the economics of the music industry fell apart.

Richard King’s wistful effort, “Original Rockers”, reflects on the three formative years in the mid-1990s when he worked at Revolver, a record shop in Bristol, Portishead’s home town. It was an establishment that cultivated a high-handed air and “a reputation for stocking and specialising in iconoclastic and esoteric records”. Dominated by its anti-social and...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1GmG56e