Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business
by Fredric Dannen
Recommended by Daniel Ek
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Recommended by 2 sources and appears in Most Recommended Books, Business, and Nonfiction.
Copiously researched and documented, Hit Men is the highly controversial portrait of the pop music industry in all its wild, ruthless glory: the insatiable greed and ambition; the enormous egos; the fierce struggles for profits and power; the vendettas, rivalries, shakedowns, and payoffs. Chronicling the evolution of America's largest music labels ...
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Why recommended
Recommended by 2 sources and appears in Most Recommended Books, Business, and Nonfiction.
Recommendation proof is sourced from public posts, interviews, reading lists, and cited references.
Daniel Ek
“Still the essential biography of the music industry. Dannen is pretty ruthless in describing a time in the music business when hustle was the name of the game — although that’s pretty much the same today, to be honest. I joke that I used to have hair before I started working in the music business, but thankfully the staggering levels of corruption that Dannen describes no longer exist.”
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Consider Accidental Presidents by Jared Cohen. Recommended by 10 sources.
“Accidental Presidents offers eight narrative portraits of men who succeeded to the U.S. presidency without election, using anecdote-rich scenes and readable context to show how personality and circumstance interact with office power. It’s strongest as a set of self-contained stories that make succession stakes concrete for non-specialist readers; it does not prioritize dense archival argument or exhaustive methodology, so expect some interpretive generalizations and repeated themes across cases. Use it for fast historical orientation rather than scholarly deep-dives.”
Each recommendation is collected from a public source — interviews, articles, or curated lists — and linked to its original URL. Books with many verifiable recommendations from respected people rank higher.
