Hit Men

The independent promoters of the 1970s and 1980s organized themselves, informally, into what the press came to call the Network. Dannen describes a small group of men who had effectively divided up the country's most important radio stations among themselves, each with his own relationships and his own turf. A label that wanted a single worked at a major-market station generally had to go through the promoter who covered it. There was no menu of alternatives; there was the Network, and there was silence.

The costs were extraordinary. A single record could accumulate promotion fees running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the labels collectively were paying tens of millions a year for a service whose mechanics no one would fully describe. What Dannen documents is the labels' own unease: executives who privately suspected the money was buying something illegal, who could not prove it, and who kept paying anyway because the alternative — not getting played — was worse. Fear did the negotiating.

If the promoters are the book's connective tissue, Walter Yetnikoff is its central character. As head of CBS Records through much of this period, Yetnikoff presided over the most powerful label group in the world during the era of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" and Bruce Springsteen's ascendance. Dannen renders him as a figure of enormous appetite and volatility — brilliant at the deal, ferocious in conflict, and utterly at home in an industry that rewarded both. He is the human embodiment of the book's title.

Yetnikoff's rivalries were legendary, above all his running war with Warner and its executives. Dannen chronicles the feuds not as gossip but as the actual mechanism of the business at the top: partnerships made and broken, artists fought over, egos managed and wounded. The music trade at this altitude looked less like commerce than like court politics, with alliances shifting according to who had insulted whom and who controlled which asset this quarter.

Step back from the individual scandals and Dannen's real argument comes into focus. The record business, more than most industries, is built on a mismatch: the product — a hit song — is wildly unpredictable, while the thing that determines its success — access to distribution and airplay — is highly controllable. Value therefore flows not to whoever creates the unpredictable thing but to whoever controls the reliable thing. The artist gambles; the intermediary collects a toll regardless of the outcome.

That structure explains why the same character keeps reappearing across the decades Dannen surveys. The song plugger of Tin Pan Alley, the payola DJ of the 1950s, the independent promoter of the 1980s, the label chief who manages the whole apparatus — these are variations on one role, the person who inserts himself into the narrow channel between music and ears and charges for passage. The technology changes; the choke point does not. And whoever owns the choke point owns the economics.

Dannen ends more or less where the reporting led him: with an industry that briefly flinched, then adapted. The independent promoters were suspended, the federal heat came and went, and the business found new arrangements for the old necessity of buying attention. The specific scandal closed; the underlying logic did not. "Hit Men" leaves us not with a villain caught but with a system revealed — one that had always paid more to move a song than to make it.