FRESH AIR
Digital media — including MP3 players, peer-to-peer networks and music websites — are changing how we discover, listen to and share music. Writer Eliot Van Buskirk joins Fresh Air to discuss the new, digital landscape of music, and the resulting changes in the music industry. Van Buskirk covers digital media for Wired.com on the blog, Listening Post. Formerly a senior editor for digital music and devices at CNET.com, he is the author of two books, Burning Down the House: Ripping, Recording, Remixing, and More! and iPod and iTunes QuickSteps. ALSO, in 2002, Dan Kennedy landed what he thought was a dream job in the freewheeling world of rock ‘n’ roll: Director of Creative Development at Atlantic Records. As it turned out, the post offered him a bizarre (and sometimes banal) look at a business that had long since gone corporate — and was in the throes of a financial struggle. “The sobering reality,” as Kennedy puts it on the book’s Web site, is that the record business had become “a nine-to-five world that’s equal parts Spinal Tap and The Office — and he’s just in time for mass layoffs, artists being cut from contracts, and sales hitting an all-time low.” Rock On: An Office Power Ballad is Kennedy’s ironic memoir of his time at Atlantic. He’s also the author of Loser Goes First: My Thirty-Something Years of Dumb Luck and Minor Humiliation and a regular contributor to McSweeney’s.
THIS AMERICAN LIFE
351: Return to Childhood 2008
Seventh-grader Kayla Hernandez likes to reminisce about when she was a child, back in fifth grade. She visits her school, where her fifth grade class met, and looks at her old books, thinks about what happened there. She says she knows that decades from now, she won’t even remember most of what’s happening to her this year, in seventh grade, and that makes her sad. This and other stories of people who try to revisit their childhoods: what they find…and what they do not find.