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The Music Business is Burning Down - Thank God!

by Otto D'Agnolo with Caesar Bach

164 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); Book Includes a CD; catalogue #05-1686; ISBN 1-4120-6775-8; US$20.50, C$23.58, EUR16.84, £11.79

Award winning songwriter/producer/engineer Otto D'Agnolo tells it like it is: why music sucks, the death of the record labels and the birth of a brand new scene. YOU'VE GOT TO READ THIS.

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About the Book      Articles and Reviews      About the Author      Excerpts      Catalogue Information

About the Book

The Music Business Is Burning Down - Thank God!

Author Otto D'Agnolo, an award winning producer/engineer/writer with 20 years in the music industry breaks rank with his peers in this gleeful heralding of the end of the music business as we've always known it! Referred to as a "novel rant", Otto mixes his vision of the future with stories from the past to describe how the current state of turmoil in the music industry is actually creating tomorrow's nirvana for music lovers. He's convinced we are seeing the dawn of an amazing age of creativity. Otto skillfully takes the reader on a tour through the music industry with stories that are sometimes as comical as they are absurd.

Can you imagine a world where music is legally free? Otto can and he lays out his arguments for it's inevitability in this sometimes funny and sometimes scary look at the future of new music. A free CD is included with the book. It is by the self proclaimed "Conqueror or Music" - Caesar Bach. Otto uses Caesar's record to demonstrate the crazy path of filters music currently passes through from music maker to music lover. He also outlines how these filters are being removed and why the new music scene will be a much more fun place to be.

While the word "illegal" seems to dominate today's discussions of digital music, Otto explains how most people are missing the boat and have no real understanding of the impact this "symptom of our digital evolution" is having on the world at large. He brings a fresh perspective to the whole concept as he describes his vision of the future for the music industry, which includes much more creativity, originality and legally free music for the consumer.

Seldom has there been a timelier book written for an industry in search of answers. If his visions hit the mark, parents can rest assured their kids won't go to jail for stealing music and musicians can trust that it will soon be easier to make a living than ever before.

Available on www.Amazon.com and ottod.com

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Articles and Reviews

How It Otto Be: Audio book 'em, Dan-O

By Serene Dominic, Phoenix New Times

Three years ago, producer/engineer Otto D'Agnolo was of two minds about the decline of originality and forward thinking in the record industry, so he did something about it. He split himself in two -- literally.

Sick of being told by A&R people with the musical impulses of a hand buzzer what makes a hit record, he created a fictitious recording artist named Caesar Bach, a stubborn visionary with no patience for formulaic music-making. Bach's music is included as a free musical companion to the book D'Agnolo's written about why you won't find this music on the radio or signed to a major label anytime soon. Throughout The Music Business Is Burning Down, Thank God (Trafford Books), he maintains this duality, which lets Otto the producer/author give an objective, track-by-track account of why Bach the musician's artistic choices (a gorgeous mash-up of Beatlesque pop with Adrian Belew-meets-Prince execution) would never pass muster with the A&R people at Universal or BMG. It also allows the author to rant about how the industry's current downfall is a mess of its own design, and to outline what it needs to do to survive with the peer-to-peer music-sharing iPod generation.

D'Agnolo's full of ideas, and he gives one away right here that isn't even in the book. "If AOL put one or two free songs by new artists on one of the 20 million or so CDs they give away each year, more people would at least be tempted to at least put the disc in their computers. Because who doesn't want free music? You could pay the artist one or two cents per CD and he'll make more than he'd ever make at a traditional label. Hello? AOL to artist -- you got royalties!"

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About the Author

Otto has worked in the music industry for over twenty years as songwriter, musician, recording engineer and record producer. His work has earned him an Emmy Award as a songwriter and a few RIAA Certified Gold and Platinum Record Awards for his work as a recording engineer and record producer.

His work includes projects for artists ranging from rap superstar DMX to music legends Glen Campbell and Waylon Jennings; from Major League Baseball's Louis Gonzales to the National Basketball Association's Stephan Marbury. Other clients included Soulfly, Alice Cooper, Herbie Mann, Ce Ce Peniston , Sam Moore, Billy Preston, Nils Lofgren, The Braxton Brothers, Wayman Tisdale and many, many more.

Otto has participated as a guest speaker at the NXNE Music and Film Festival in Toronto, Canada and has spent the last four years as a celebrity judge for FOX TV's American Idol regional preliminaries in Arizona along side Lou Rawls, Sam Moore, Ruth McCartney and Kerry Dunn.

Otto is also a voting member of NARAS (National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences) and he is a BMI (Broadcast Music Inc.) affiliated music publisher and songwriter. Currently, he owns and operates a professional audio recording facility in Phoenix, Arizona called Chaton Studios which he designed and built in 1999 and where he continues to produce records today.

It's from this wonderfully diverse and extensive musical background that Otto presents this thought provoking look at where we've been, where we are and where we're going, musically speaking.

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Excerpts

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Catalogue Information

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