Fred Goodman Returns To The Beat With FORTUNE’S FOOL, Published 7/13

Fred Goodman, author of the acclaimed music business exposé The Mansion on the Hill, returns to the beat with FORTUNE'S FOOL: Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis. Much as Mansion traced the evolution of the rebellious ideals of rock music into the commercial music business of the mid-1990s through the careers of Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and Bob Dylan, Goodman explores the seismic changes that have rocked the record industry in the last 20 years - from the ascendancy of the CD to the catastrophic decline triggered by Napster-by examining how controversial Seagram heir Edgar Bronfman, Jr., despite losing $3 billion of the family's money on Vivendi, took a big risk but asked all the right questions about media in the digital age when he set out to recreate Warner Music.

Kirkus Review has praised FORTUNE'S FOOL as a "compellingly told story of the Seagram heir's music-business adventures at Universal and Warner Music, and what went terribly wrong. . . Goodman tells the story briskly, with total command of both the financial and aesthetic elements of his tale. Especially engrossing is his account of Warner's catastrophic decline under corporate hatchet men Robert Morgado and Michael Fuchs. The executives who played key roles in the latter-day fortunes of Universal and Warner-canny vet Doug Morris, rap-savvy combatants Jimmy Iovine and Lyor Cohen-are all sharply delineated. Deftly balanced and well-sourced-one of the most solid music-biz bios in recent memory."

The Mansion on the Hill, which remains one of the most revealing accounts of the music business ever published, won the Ralph Gleason Music Book Award for the best title of 1997. A life-long New Yorker, Goodman also wrote The Secret City: Woodlawn Cemetery and the Buried History of New York. His writing appears in Rolling Stone (where he was an editor), The New York Times, and many national magazines. He began writing about the music industry for trade publications such as Cash Box and Billboard. In 1993 - six years before Napster - Goodman's cover story in the December issue of Musician Magazine, "Future Shocks: The End of the Music Business As We Know It," which predicted the rise of downloading and the extraordinary ramifications the development would have for record companies and musician, became a record industry sensation.

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