Nobody seems to understand the music business - from Payola, to iPods, to Little Richard to Richard Branson. With his book Dirty Little Secrets of the Record Business: Why So Much Music You Hear Sucks, one brave soul, Hank Bordowitz, has nobly attempted to transpose the Byzantine mechanizations of the powerhouse music industry into a palatable text for public consumption, supposedly thereby revealing why the music industry is able to produce and distribute so much disappointing music. While succeeding in conveying the information in a digestible way, Bordowitz fails in meeting the expectations promised in the title.

The book is well–researched. It’s mostly easy to follow. And yet after reading it, I honestly don’t feel like I am any closer to knowing why most of the music I hear sucks (other than my own biased opinion). I now know how sucky music is produced, marketed, distributed, and consumed. But I still don’t know why the music is made in the first place. This is what I want to know. Why are bands that are so clearly terrible able to make a career out of being so terrible?

Sure, the music business is complicated and broad and Bordowitz covers it well. You’ve got your production, your distribution, your marketing, your radio, your music video and most importantly, you have your consumer. And that, I would wager to guess, is where the blame for most of the music I hear sucking lies and where, unfortunately, Bordowitz is hesitant to lay any of the blame. Yes, record companies want me to listen to whatever they want to sell me, but I realized a long time ago that I don’t have to buy, listen to, or even be aware of their crap. It is a conscious choice and it begins with switching off the radio and the music video and making an effort to seek what you like and find out about more of the same.

Bordowitz made the unfortunate decision to include a lot of numbers within the text of the book. I wanted this book to enthrall me with some sort of revealing insight, but instead, I got math. Math! Numbers can be effective to illustrate a point, but when I start to see numbers too often, I just tune out. True, the music business is indeed a business and is consequently a slave to the ever-important “bottom-line,” but using far-reaching (and admittedly simplistic) economic analyses to support the thesis of “why so much music you hear sucks” hardly seems effective or really even necessary, not to mention not very “rock and roll”.