Steve Knopper’s new book is Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. It’s a delightful read for anyone with any interest in how the record industry got itself in the nasty little fix it’s in, and a great corrective device for anyone who thinks it doesn’t deserve to be there.

As I note in our chat below, he doesn’t start with Napster; he takes us back to the trouble’s origins in the go-go CD years, when companies could seemingly mint money, boy bands ruled, and larger-than-life figures like Yetnikoff, Geffen and Mottola stood astride the industry, their imaginations encompassing everything except the corrosive implications of music turned into little ones and zeroes set loose from shiny and expensive discs.

I’ve know Steve since our days running around seeing music in the early years of SXSW. Since 2002, he’s been Rolling Stone’s main industry reporter. Hitsville loves mocking Rolling Stone, but it’s true that the magazine has devoted a lot more space to industry reporting in recent years than it ever has.

I asked Steve if he had the time to talk about his book and he graciously agreed. We’ll be exchanging emails and I’ll be posting the results here this week and next.

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HITSVILLE: Congrats on the book, and thank you for a very fun read. Indeed, I think a lot of people will be talking about how exactly how to define the pleasure your tome affords. My offering: It was like watching a showboating asshole total his Hummer, and then crawl from the wreckage to the jeers of those watching. Here’s my first question: What’s the sense you get from the industry people you’ve been talking to, post crash? Are they humbled? Defiant? Determined? Depressed?

STEVE KNOPPER: Thanks, Bill! The answer is it sort of depends who you talk to. The Edgar Bronfmans and Doug Morrises are determined to push on with their big new digital ideas (from taxing the ISPs to selling albums in a multitude of formats, like ringtones and Guitar Hero tracks, not just the monolithic CD) and all I and everybody else gets out of them is chin-up happy talk. But that’s to be expected from CEOs, I guess. The lower-down people are obviously more depressed. They have far less resources than they used to have, not to mention distillations of their artist rosters to the sure-thing hitmakers, and their jobs are at risk. I got a lot of “thanks for writing this book but it’s so sad!” feedback from a variety of publicists and digital sources I talk to.

HITSVILLE: There’s a certain poignance to the industry right now, certainly. Record companies must seem so … 20th century to a young band. In the old days, of course, the companies could focus their attentions with big advances. Today, not so much. Do you have any sense of how day-to-day signings of new bands are going? Are they few and far between?

KNOPPER: I’m working on a story about this now for Rolling Stone. It’s hard to get hard numbers about day-to-day signings, but I’m learning just this week the recession has not been kind to major record labels. They’ve continued to cut resources and lay people off, including A&R (talent-signing) hotshots like Andy Karp of Atlantic and Kyambo “Hip-Hop” Joshua of Sony Music’s urban department and a former key guy at Jay-Z’s Roc-a-Fella Records. I guess you could argue that these high-salaried folks represent the old-school, big-spending music industry and that it’s imperative that labels get “leaner and meaner.” But I don’t see how laying off your best A&R people leads to more instinctive signings of great artists. It’s bad out there.