Art Industry

Steve Jobs tried to stop this moment from ever happening. Google and Microsoft made bids to preempt it. The music industry blocked it time and again. Yet, on a summer's eve in 2011, the whiz-kid CEO of a Swedish start-up celebrated his company's US launch. In the midst of the Apple-Android tech war and a music-label crusade against piracy and illegal downloading, Spotify redrew the battle lines, sent shock waves through Silicon Valley, and got the hardline executives at Universal, Sony, and Warner to sign with its "free-mium" platform.

Prepare to be schooled in the art of conversation by dynamic duo Casey Wilson and Jessica St. Clair. Dismissing the notion that small talk is a painful social obligation, these self-proclaimed small talk maestros share their gift of gab in this laugh-out-loud and instructive audiobook. With their help you might find yourself excitedly asking your barista about the weather…and maybe you’ll get a free coffee. Who knows!

In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of 19th-century surgery on the eve of profound transformation. She conjures up early operating theaters - no place for the squeamish - and surgeons, working before anesthesia, who were lauded for their speed and brute strength. They were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. A young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister would solve the deadly riddle and change the course of history.

The story of poison is the story of power. For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns, and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners. Servants licked the royal family's spoons, tried on their underpants, and tested their chamber pots. Ironically, royals terrified of poison were unknowingly poisoning themselves daily with their cosmetics, medications, and filthy living conditions.

For more than thirty years, All You Need to Know About the Music Business has been universally regarded as the definitive guide to the music industry. Now in its eleventh edition, Passman leads novices and experts alike through what has been the most profound change in the music business since the days of wax cylinders and piano rolls: streaming. For the first time in history, music is no longer monetized by selling something—it’s monetized by how many times a listener streams a song.

In this star-studded autobiography, Clive Davis shares a personal, candid look into his remarkable life and the last 50 years of popular music as only a true insider can. In the history of popular music, no one looms as large as Clive Davis. His career has spanned more than 40 years, and he has discovered, signed, or worked with a staggering array of artists: Whitney Houston, Janis Joplin, Simon and Garfunkel, Barry Manilow, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Dionne Warwick, Carlos Santana, The Grateful Dead, Alicia Keyes, Kelly Clarkson, Jennifer Hudson, and Aretha Franklin, to name a few.

One in ten American adults tried intermittent fasting last year, and they may be on to something. The latest research shows that fasting repairs cellular damage, improves the outcomes for chemotherapy patients, and helps with keeping a healthy weight, leading to a resurgence in recent years. Journalist Steve Hendricks’s The Oldest Cure in the World tells the history of fasting—from the ancient world (Jesus treated an epileptic with fasting) to its rediscovery centuries later.

For decades, Adam Gopnik has been one of our most beloved writers, a brilliantly perceptive critic of art, food, France, and more. But recently, he became obsessed by a fundamental matter: How did the people he was writing about learn their outlandish skill, whether it was drawing a nude or baking a sourdough loaf? In The Real Work, Gopnik apprentices himself to an artist, a dancer, a boxer, and even a driving instructor (from the DMV), among others, trying his late-middle-age hand at things he assumed were beyond him.

In February 2019, the world lost one of its most enduring cultural icons, Karl Lagerfeld, the creative director for the storied House of Chanel for thirty-five years. Larger than life, Lagerfeld was legendary not only for reinventing Chanel; and creating constant fashion excitement at Chloé, Fendi, and his eponymous brand; but also for his vivid personal style, including his signature uniform of dark sunglasses and a powdered white ponytail. And then there was his utter devotion to his cat, Choupette.

Just because arts organizations are non-profits doesn't mean they shouldn't make money; it means the money they make goes back to fund the mission—whether that's music, visual arts, theatre, dance, or one of many other mediums that enrich our lives.

A week after her 41st birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, pro-pain "dolorists", and the many little murders of capitalism.

Racial identity, pop culture, and delusions of perfection collide in an eye-opening and refreshingly frank memoir by fashion and beauty insider Danielle Prescod.

Legendary music producer LA Reid - the man behind artists such as Mariah Carey, Toni Braxton, Kanye West, Rihanna, TLC, Outkast, Pink, Justin Bieber, and Usher - changed the music business forever. Now he tells his story, taking fans on an intimate tour of his life. Sing to Me is a fascinating journey from Reid's small-town R&B roots in Cincinnati, Ohio, and his work as a drummer to his fame as a Grammy Award-winning music producer and his gig as a judge on the hit reality show The X Factor.

How Music Got Free is a riveting story of obsession, music, crime, and money, featuring visionaries and criminals, moguls and tech-savvy teenagers. It's about the greatest pirate in history, the most powerful executive in the music business, a revolutionary invention, and an illegal website four times the size of the iTunes music store.

This is perhaps one of the best-loved of all journals. William Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy, began it in May 1800 and resolved to keep it for a short time. She continued it for nearly three years. In it, she brought the Dove Cottage years to vivid and intimate life. She noted the walks and weather, the friends, country neighbours, and travellers on the roads. She set down accounts of the garden, of Wordsworth's marriage, their concern for Coleridge, and the composition of Wordsworth's poetry.

Before Instagram was an art form, fashion photographers were pop culture royalty. From the postwar covers of Vogue until the triumph of the digital image, the fashion photographer sold not only clothes but ideals of beauty and fantasies of perfect lives. Even when they succumbed to temptation and excess, the very few photographers who rose to the top were artists above all.

Mark Devlin is a long-standing DJ and music journalist. Musical Truth is the culmination of his five years of research into the true nature of the industry and its objectives - from dark occult rituals, to mind-controlled artists, and all points in between. The book shows how these agendas fit into the much wider picture of what’s really going on in the world, and - crucially - how the power lies with us to bring it to an end."

Rather - who has won every prestigious journalism award in his distinguished career - discusses all the big stories from his decades of reporting. This very personal accounting includes (but is certainly not limited to) his dismissal from CBS, the Abu Ghraib story, the George W. Bush Air National Guard controversy, his coverage of the JFK assassination, the origin of "Hurricane Dan", as well as inside stories about all the top personalities Dan has either interviewed or worked with over his remarkable career.

Music journalists Dean Budnick and Josh Baron chronicle the behind-the-scenes history of the modern concert industry. Filled with entertaining rock-and-roll anecdotes about The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, Pearl Jam, and more - and charting the emergence of players like Ticketmaster, StubHub, Live Nation, and Outbox - Ticket Masters will transfix every concertgoer who wonders just where the price of admission really goes. This edition has an updated epilogue that covers recent industry developments.

Editing is an invisible art where the very best work goes undetected. Editors strive to create books that are enlightening, seamless, and pleasurable to read, all while giving credit to the author. In What Editors Do, Peter Ginna gathers essays from 27 leading figures in book publishing about their work. Representing both large houses and small, and encompassing trade, textbook, academic, and children's publishing, the contributors make the case for why editing remains a vital function to writers - and readers - everywhere.