KayTo
The Hours Are Long, But the Pay Is Low
I'm not really a memoir gal, and I usually steer away from first-person nonfiction, but despite all odds*... I really enjoyed this. The writing was so readable (even if it took me more than a week to read the book), and the tone was immensely Midwestern. He kept saying he isn't educated about music history, but man, the connections he draws throughout beg to differ.
It also explains the voice of Bloodshot, which I literally never realized was his goddamn voice. The random stories shared were all top notch. And where he could have leaned into the truly awful (a few artists had really bad shit; some staffers weren't the least lascivious or most honest people around; the double-demise of the original label), his attitude of, "Welp, you just keep going" was heartwarming instead of tell-all. (He'd probably hate being called "heartwarming".)
Overall, such a fantastic (as in, great, but also as in, how the hell did they pull it off for so long, especially since there had been such deep, hidden issues for so long?!) story or time capsule of a quietly but immensely important label and its artists.
*Okay, full disclosure - some odds were on the "she'll enjoy it" side -- I worked for Bloodshot as an intern, then as the hourly person paid to get their back catalog uploaded to the swath of streaming services. But I never got to know Rob because he was doing it all from the only single-person office room [conveniently across the hall from the single shared bathroom], and my impression of him was shy, smart, sarcastic, and way more interested in literally any other aspect of the business than the metadata and file conversions required by each digital library.
Based on the few direct references to streaming, yup, I wasn't wrong.
I'm not really a memoir gal, and I usually steer away from first-person nonfiction, but despite all odds*... I really enjoyed this. The writing was so readable (even if it took me more than a week to read the book), and the tone was immensely Midwestern. He kept saying he isn't educated about music history, but man, the connections he draws throughout beg to differ.
It also explains the voice of Bloodshot, which I literally never realized was his goddamn voice. The random stories shared were all top notch. And where he could have leaned into the truly awful (a few artists had really bad shit; some staffers weren't the least lascivious or most honest people around; the double-demise of the original label), his attitude of, "Welp, you just keep going" was heartwarming instead of tell-all. (He'd probably hate being called "heartwarming".)
Overall, such a fantastic (as in, great, but also as in, how the hell did they pull it off for so long, especially since there had been such deep, hidden issues for so long?!) story or time capsule of a quietly but immensely important label and its artists.
*Okay, full disclosure - some odds were on the "she'll enjoy it" side -- I worked for Bloodshot as an intern, then as the hourly person paid to get their back catalog uploaded to the swath of streaming services. But I never got to know Rob because he was doing it all from the only single-person office room [conveniently across the hall from the single shared bathroom], and my impression of him was shy, smart, sarcastic, and way more interested in literally any other aspect of the business than the metadata and file conversions required by each digital library.
Based on the few direct references to streaming, yup, I wasn't wrong.