Death Is Not So Bad!

When Tim Renner applied to the German record company Polydor in 1986, he intended to write an exposé about the music industry. However, things went differently and he turned this exposé into a career. For eighteen years his biography has been intermeshed with the development of the music industry, he led bands like Element of Crime, Rammstein, Tocotronic and Philip Boa to sucess. He raised up higher and higher on the ladder, finally reaching the top of Universal Music Germany. He witnessed how musical development has been hampered by the pressure of the markets, how pop and commerce diffused, and importantly, he witnessed the rapid dissolution of old comercial structures through the forces of digitalzation and globalization. But the ponderous giant labels kept their eyes shut in front of these developments and Renner finally quit. After his leave from Universal in 2004 he described his point of view on what he found were wrong tracks and challenges of contemporary pop music. 'Death is not bad!' is a profound analysis of culture and music in times of digitalization, based on the vison that creativity, consumption and capital could find a way of coexistence. Ten years after the German edition of this book was published some passages read like a history book about a long forgotten time. Some passages pointing to developments which are fully manifested today and look to evolve further in the future. The book shows the changes of a whole industry and the first steps of a society on it's way into the digitalized future.

Tim Renner, born 1964, was a musical writer when he started working for the German Record Company Polydor, part of the multinational trust PolyGram. His intention was to write an exposé about the 'EVIL' major label. But he found the music industry provided him with the means to carry artists out of their niche into mainstream. After an argument with the international top management about the future course of market leader Universal Music Renner resigned from his job as head of Universal Music Germany in early 2004. He founded his own company Motor Entertainment providing management and label-services for independent artists.