The last time the music business died

As music and the music business evolves today, the content of the music often plays second fiddle to the debate about economics. About digital royalties, performance royalties, Pandora, Spotify, etc. In many ways the medium impacts the message, the songs we hear and what gets produced and what becomes popular.

And why not? After all, it is the music business! In fact, it always has been a business, but one balanced precariously on the fulcrum of popular taste.

Where those two ideas and trends intersect, is usually responsible for the kind of music we get.

All of this went through a revolutionary shift in the post war years, another time of creative destruction in the business of music. The results of which, changed music forever.

Professor and journalist Ben Yagoda examines this time in The B Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song

My conversation with Ben Yagoda: