The Hitmen: The Shocking True Story of a Family of Killers for Hire

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Despite being published 20 years ago, this paperback edition of Dannen’s explosive music industry exposé is an enthralling read. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you.

This amount includes seller specified domestic postage charges as well as applicable international postage, dispatch, and other fees. Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. Fredric Dannen was a co-recipient of the Overseas Press Club’s 1986 Morton Frank Award for business reporting from abroad.It details the terrible cost in human suffering, particularly the death of an innocent teenage girl, Mariaora Rostas, when she randomly crossed their path. No one, insider or outsider, has ever grasped the basic concept of power in the pop-music business better than Fredric Dannen in Hit Men. Dannen’s triumph is his ability to reduce the complicated problems and issues of the music industry to precise, personal situations. Combined with a rare inside look at how the corporate conglomerates dealt with goings on makes this an important book for true music nuts like myself.

While [Neil] Bogart [of Casablanca] made himself wealthy and launched many hit acts, he was not a model businessman. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. It's competently but not amazingly well written and seems to suffer from a focus bias based on the author's sources.The Dannen book also becomes a tale of 2 giants of the record industry, Clive Davis and Walter Yetnikof, and how their rise and fall was tied to the tale of record promotion. Fredric Dannen's Hit Men chronicles the music business in America from the invention of the phonograph all the way to the introduction of the CD. With the rise of music streaming this book may not be as relevant as it used to be, but if you're interested in how the music business worked in the old days, it's a sobering read. A legendary book, I suppose, and the first half or so lives up to it--yeasty, contentious, endlessly quotable shtick from a legion of record execs, all variously self-justifying, crap-talking, defending themselves, lying, and constantly deploying abundant traditional Yiddish invective to explain why the opponent at hand is a goniff, shlemiel, causes shpilkes, etc. It is not a fantastic book if you wanted to know about the history of the music industry during that time more generally.