📚 Finished reading  Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone, 125 Years of Pop Music by Peter Doggett. An epic work that felt paradoxically too long and yet not detailed enough. It’s incredible to read a book like this in 2024 when I have access to almost all of the songs that are referenced, being able to hear for myself at the press of a button what the author described. (I can’t believe how many artists I’m familiar with only through their stories in books and music magazines that I read as a teenager.) Electric Shock is quite a dry read, slow going in places, but I’m glad I kept with it. I’d completely forgotten about the 16rpm vinyl format which I could use on my childhood record player to make songs sound otherworldly. Towards the end of the book it also got me thinking about how physical music sales to the mass market probably were a temporary blip, with live performance being the dominant medium for artists to earn an income both before and after.