I’m chatting for the next week with Steve Knopper, whose new book, Appetite for Self-Destruction, charts the travails the music industry has been going through, Part I is here.

HITSVILLE: You do a great job of setting the scene. You don’t start with Napster: The roots of the industry’s decline go much deeper. It’s one of my cherished contentions that the industry is built on three footstool legs of fraud: Payola in radio, price-fixing at retail, and nonpayment of royalties to artists. If the digital age had never come, would things have ever changed?

KNOPPER: As I was writing the book I started asking myself, what does a major record label do (traditionally)? And I came up with: signing talent, buying studio time to make albums, bribing radio stations to play the albums, bribing record stores to display them prominently and bribing journalists with free albums to write about them. That system worked for a long, long time, and it had its merits — without it we probably wouldn’t have Thriller or Toni Braxton or Pearl Jam’s Ten. But the labels took it too far by the ’90s. Even before the Internet there were signs that people wouldn’t replace their LPs with more expensive CDs forever. As you know, in the late ’90s, the labels artificially went around this problem by selling entire CDs containing one good song, and that flowed into the teen-pop era. Consumers were complaining about this—as a fan of Smash Mouth’s “Walking On the Sun,” I know I was!—even before Napster. So there probably would have been some form of sales rebellion, or maybe new singles-only labels, or something, if there had been no MP3, Napster or Internet. But “if the digital age had never come… ” is a hard thing to speculate about! If cars had never come, would the perfectly reliable horse-and-buggy industry still be thriving today?

HITSVILLE: Yeah I think that’s a good point; some sort of exhaustion might have set in. When people talk about the benchmark from which CD sales have fallen, they often neglect to mention that the ’90s were also built on the Great CD Rebuying Spree, where the labels took music they’d already sold one and repackaged it for us at twice the price! You detail this delightful story in your book. Incredibly, it’s almost the story of a series of accidents. The CD revolution happened almost despite the industry. Were any lessons learned? And do you have any estimate of how much of the 90s bounty came from catalog sales?

KNOPPER: Good question. I went back to my ’90s Soundscan reports and couldn’t find any data on catalog sales. I think the ’80s were really the time, generally speaking because obviously I have no data, when people replaced their old LPs. By the ’90s, with desirable new artists like (at first) Nirvana and Snoop Doggy Dogg and (later) Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys, people were well ensconced in CD-buying habits. Top label executives learned exactly the wrong lessons from the CD adoption process and subsequent boom. They learned that if they could control everything, from distribution to retail, just like they did with LPs, they could make a LOT more money on CDs. They conspicuously did not learn that embracing a new technology, which of course they did with CDs, eventually, could help their industry and lead to even greater sales heights. This lesson could have proved useful when Napster et al. rolled around.