(Simon & Schuster, $28)
This “deeply researched, engagingly written portrait” of Warner Music Group’s chief executive, Edgar Bronfman Jr., is also a sad comment on the sorry state of the music industry, said this heir to the Seagram fortune bought Warner Music Ethan Smith in The Wall Street Journal. In 2004 a private-equity team led by—just as online file sharing and 99-cent downloads started decimating record sales. Bronfman’s timing may have been off, but he’s a “strangely sympathetic character” who has actually done a better job than most at shepherding his music label into the digital era, said Devin Leonard in The New York Times. Still, “I wish that Mr. Goodman would have delved more deeply into the cultural implications of Warner Music’s tribulations.” While record labels have always put out plenty of “top 40 schlock,” they also continued to bankroll more ambitious and meaningful endeavors. Now, with profit margins dwindling, “it’s pretty much all Lady Gaga all the time.”
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