Part 1: The Forde Transit
Welcome back to the Daily Active User Podcast. Eamonn Forde is one of the sharpest music business writers working today. Over 25 years he’s chronicled the music industry’s greatest triumphs, most spectacular failures, and everything in between. Forde’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The Guardian, Music Business Worldwide, The Quietus, and Forbes. He’s also the author of three essential books: The Final Days of EMI: Selling the Pig (Omnibus Press, 2019), Leaving the Building: The Lucrative Afterlife of Music Estates (Omnibus Press, 2021), and 1999: The Year the Record Industry Lost Control (Omnibus Press, 2024).
In Part 1 we dive into Forde’s journey, from the AC/DC cassette sleeve that planted the seed, to a PhD he walked away from, to becoming the person executives trust with their off-the-record confessions. We talk about the tension between art and money, why the best label bosses are part wildcatter and part diplomat, what happens when high finance tries to teach the music industry how to operate, and what the Terra Firma–EMI disaster reveals about the limits of spreadsheets in a world running on gut instinct and Gorillaz albums.
The accidental music business writer
Benji: Eamonn, you and I have known each other quite some time now from the music industry scene, but you’ve been in this a long time. For someone who’s newish to the music industry, what should they know about you?
Eamonn: I would describe myself as a music business writer. I write about all different aspects of the music business and have done for pretty much 25 years. I’m freelance, so I write for lots of different publications. I’ve written three books, one possibly coming on the horizon soon-ish. I kind of ran away from academia. I was in academia in the ‘90s and then did a PhD and decided that a PhD was worthless to me because I didn’t want to work in academia. What I was specializing in was around popular music studies—the political economy of the music business, institutions, organizational structures—which I think helped give me a good grounding for what I do now.
Benji: Was there a gateway band, a gateway concert, something that made you go, there’s a business behind all this?
Eamonn: The damascene moment was the very first album I ever bought: Back in Black by AC/DC, on cassette. I remember looking at the sleeve notes and they had this thing about Atlantic Records in Rockefeller Plaza in New York. I think that was probably the first time I realized there was a business, a structure, a machine behind this. I’m not saying I suddenly tracked down Donald Passman to ask him how the music industry worked at the age of 14, but it was percolating. Then as I started reading the music press, I was paying lots of attention to record labels. From that, you find out about music publishing, the live side, lawyers, rights, copyright—the whole thing snowballs. So I don’t know if Angus Young wants to take responsibility for me, but he’s going to have to.
The PhD, the process, and the sausage
Benji: Were you ever curious to get into the music industry proper? Join a label or a publishing company?
Eamonn: No, I don’t think so. I did a PhD on music journalism—the sociology of news production. I was taking what people like Philip Schlesinger had done with the BBC, what Jeremy Tunstall had done with print journalism, these landmark sociological studies, and applied that to arts criticism. But I didn’t want to be a music journalist reviewing bands. That requires certain skills I don’t think I have. Then by accident, I fell into writing about the music industry. I was fortunate to walk into a few situations where I realized you can earn a living typing words about the music industry. Increasingly less these days, but hey, I’m still here.
Benji: You’re three books in and they go into how the sausage is made. Do you still like the sausage?
Eamonn: What’s that thing, you should never see how they make sausages? I think studying it makes you appreciate the people who do it well. This is an industry that is equal parts amazing, ridiculous, and cruel. There’s always been an uneasy tension between economics and art, and I think probably nowhere more so than in the music industry.
I always remember one of the first big executives I interviewed in the early 2000s, a guy named Brent Hansen who was running MTV in Europe. We ended up talking about Tim Buckley because we both loved Tim Buckley. And then he said something that’s always stuck with me: If anyone in this industry tells you they know how this industry works, walk away—they’re a liar.
Artists and the machine
Benji: Do you ever spend time with artists? There’s always that moment where you realize, oh, you don’t know how this actually works.
Eamonn: Pre-digital, artists didn’t really have to know that much about the music industry. They cashed the checks and off they went. Those were the days of milk and honey. But when the bitter harvest of digital threw away all the old indulgences, artists had to become much more self-starting, much more knowledgeable. And industry knowledge became less esoteric because of the internet.
I write for The Guardian in the UK and almost exclusively write about music industry stuff. The music desk considers a review of an album and an interview with the head of Suno as kind of equal—they’re both interesting stories. Any music journalist who doesn’t think there’s a machine behind this is massively deluded.
I remember the editor of a big music magazine once said to me, I’m not in the music industry. I said, You absolutely are. Where does all your advertising money come from? You are a promotional wing of the music industry, whether you like it or not.
Writing the books
Benji: Of the three books, which was the hardest to write and which was the hardest to get the best information for?
Eamonn: There’s a point where you can start to feel the shape of the book once you’re absorbed in the topic. The books run about 150,000 words, but you break it into chapters of about 7,000 words. That’s not intimidating.
The one that was hardest to get people to speak on the record was the EMI book, simply because lots of sources were still in the music business, had signed NDAs, or were terrified of being sued. I interviewed about a hundred people—maybe a quarter to a third were on the record. The rest were on background or “an insider said.” There’s a real sense of moral responsibility—these people trusted you and you do not let them down. You never reveal your sources.
The academic background helped; thesis, antithesis, synthesis. You take an argument, the counter-argument, and somewhere in the middle is the truth.
Leaving the Building was very easy to get people to talk for because people in the estates business had been almost overlooked. No one ever speaks to us, they’d say. Morrissey captured that crass side in “Paint a Vulgar Picture” on the last Smiths album—the record company celebrating because they can finally make money. But there’s also stuff done very carefully, very thoughtfully.
I interviewed Mary Guibert, Jeff Buckley’s mother—a very intense three-hour Zoom interview in the middle of the pandemic. At one point she burst into tears. She said, “I only allow myself a cry every day*.*” She not only has to think about her son on a daily basis—she has to think about his legacy and his business. Most parents who lose a child don’t have to do business deals in the name of their dead child.
I spoke to Jemima Dury, who runs the Ian Dury estate, sister of Baxter Dury. At the end of the interview I asked her: all the way through, you talked about him as “Ian,” not “Dad.” She said, “That’s a coping mechanism. If I call him Ian, he becomes Ian the musician, the creator, rather than my dad.”
A lawyer had told me: It’s the grandchildren that always kill an estate because they don’t have an emotional connection with the person who died. That reminded me of Samuel Bronfman, who built Seagram’s empire—he had a saying in his office: Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.
The 1999 book wasn’t hard to get people to talk about either. People had retired, come to peace with it. They were able to be critical of processes rather than people. With the EMI–Terra Firma book, it was very intense—a culture clash between high finance and the creative arts.
Art vs. money: wildcatters and oil towers
Benji: You touch on this tension where art needs to make money. Record labels used to be lawless places. Then financial people came in speaking an entirely different language. Terra Firma was that tension personified. When did that really rear its head?
Eamonn: It was always there. The best labels were people who understood art and the temperamental nature of musicians. The people I always look to are someone like Jac Holzman at Elektra—a phenomenal ear, but also a technologist who to this day understands how technology can change the music industry. In the UK, Martin Mills at **Beggars Group—**an incredible dealmaker who can speak to artists on their level but also builds a team around him. Beggars turns almost 50 years old now. They can do the most obtuse art and they can do Adele. They’re not scared of being commercial, but commercial on their terms.
Richard Russell at XL, heavily mentored by Martin Mills—when he signed the White Stripes, loads of similar bands came along. He said, Why would I want the second-best White Stripes? I want the White Stripes. And Martin Mills always said: The public don’t know what they want until you give it to them. Put the Pixies down on paper—a bald man singing about incest in Spanish—and the public would say absolutely not. Then they hear “Where Is My Mind?” and it’s astonishing.
It’s people like Jac Holzman, Richard Russell, Martin Mills, Laurence Bell at Domino who find that magic. There’s a great analogy comparing the industry to the oil business. The independents are the wildcatters—just a person with a shovel over their shoulder going, I think there’s something here. The majors are really good at building the oil towers and the infrastructure. Every single important musical development has come through independent labels. I defy anyone to show me a significant genre that came only through the major label system.
High finance meets the music industry
Benji: What about the pure financial players—sovereign wealth funds tying up with Sony, Bain Capital with Warner? Is that healthy?
Eamonn: On the good side, these are people who understand finance in a way the music industry didn’t. But the Terra Firma–EMI story showed there’s an incompatibility. Someone like Martin Mills knows how to speak to an artist. Someone like Guy Hands at Terra Firma absolutely does not—nor should they. That’s not their specialism.
The downside is they expect growth comparable to other sectors. The music industry is hugely unpredictable. CFOs confirmed to me that 90% of artists signed to a major label fail to break even. The 10% that do make a lot of money—ideally a Beatles pays for everything else on EMI in the ‘60s, or a Pink Floyd in the ‘70s.
There was a story in the EMI book—a Gorillaz album had slipped from one financial year into the next and the share price tanked. Chris Martin from Coldplay got really annoyed: Don’t use my album not being delivered on time to explain away your share price. The City just didn’t understand that you can’t force a product when the artist isn’t happy.
With Terra Firma, one executive watched an EMI act go on Saturday Night Live and their sales went up 300%. Another EMI artist went on a couple months later—sales only went up 125%. They couldn’t understand it. They both went on TV—how does this work?
High finance is drawn to the glamor. The Financial Times loves a music industry story because they can put a picture of Taylor Swift instead of the head of a turkey burger company. They think, We can teach these people how to do it better. And that was the undoing of Terra Firma. They didn’t understand artists, and they didn’t know how to communicate with them.
There’s a lot they can learn from each other, but there’s a lot that can destroy the other. It’s knowing the difference between what’s the strength and what’s the poison.
End of Part 1
That’s where we leave Part 1. We’ve covered Forde’s journey into the music business, the emotional weight of writing about music estates, how 90% of artists signed to a major label fail to break even, and the eternal tension between the people who find the oil and the people who build the towers.
In Part 2, we tackle the big question: Is 2023 the new 1999? We talk AI, the bond-versus-venture bet that billions of dollars are riding on, why arrogance is both the music industry’s superpower and its Achilles heel, and whether any CEO would actually listen if you followed them into the urinal to warn them about what’s coming. Plus, Eamonn reveals the chapter title he’d put on his headstone.
Show Notes:
Eamonn Forde
Eamonn Forde’s Books
The Final Days of EMI: Selling the Pig — Omnibus Press, 2019
Leaving the Building: The Lucrative Afterlife of Music Estates — Omnibus Press, 2021
1999: The Year the Record Industry Lost Control — Omnibus Press, 2024
Key Articles Referenced
“Is this man the future of music – or its executioner?” — The Guardian, Jan 2026 (profile of Suno CEO Mikey Shulman)
“How the Music Industry is in a New Age of Arrogance” — The Quietus, May 2024
“AI of the storm: artificial intelligence and the music industry in 2023” — Synchtank
“The music industry frets about AI music, but is it just a new form of Muzak?” — MBW
“Music’s addicted to the ‘Monthly Active User’ metric. But it tells us nothing” — MBW
Other Books Mentioned
The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook
