Text and photographs record the steps involved in cutting a record in Nashville, one of the nation's top recording cities.

There's a reason hit songs offer such guilty pleasure--they're designed that way. Over the last two decades a new type of hit song has emerged, one that is almost inescapably catchy. Pop songs have always had a "hook," but today's songs bristle with them: a hook every seven seconds is the rule. Painstakingly crafted to tweak the brain's delight in melody, rhythm, and repetition, these songs are highly processed products. Like snack-food engineers,...

An all-female pop-rock band discovers that they are pawns in an evil plot to control the youth of America.

Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. This book contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of 'teardown' from reverse-engineering processes, a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify's product and the way it is commonly understood. Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit...

Interviewing the wives of famous hip-hop artists while planning her own wedding to a rising star, journalist Alex Maxwell discovers sad truths about her subjects' lives that force her to make difficult personal and professional choices.

"Motown: The Sound of Young America is the definitive, visual history of the Detroit-based independent record company which became a style unto itself, a prolific and hugely successful production line of suave, sassy and sophisticated music through the sixties, seventies and eighties. Featuring extensive, specially commissioned photography of treasures gathered from the archives, this landmark publication also captures the graphic and design iconography...

Music has been a constant in human history, an intermingling of voice and instrument that for all its local variation and increasing sophistication nevertheless endured in more or less the same form for centuries. Then came recording--and music was forever transformed. Soundbreaking, an eight-part event television series, traces this ongoing sonic revolution, and explores the nexus of cutting-edge technology and human artistry that has created the...