The Conduit: How rock music was shaped, controlled and transformed by the systems that brought it to listeners. (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798196443114)

At a certain point, the music no longer lived in the performance.
It lived in the recording.

The Conduit is the story of what happened next.

This is not a conventional history of rock music. It is an examination of the system that emerged once music became something that could be captured, repeated, and distributed at scale. As recording technology advanced, an entire structure formed around it-record labels, studios, radio networks, and distribution channels-creating a pathway through which sound traveled from artist to listener.

That system-the Conduit-did more than deliver music. It shaped it.

Through a series of scenes, historical moments, and structural analysis, The Conduit traces the transformation of music from a live, unrepeatable experience into a fixed, recorded object-and the consequences of that shift. Rock music becomes the central lens, not simply as a genre, but as the first form to fully inhabit this new reality: built in the studio, refined through repetition, and distributed to a mass audience.

The result was unprecedented scale. Music that once existed locally could now reach millions. But scale came with structure-and structure introduced control, selection, and influence. The same system that amplified extraordinary work also imposed limits, shaping what could be heard and how it reached the world.

The Conduit explores that tension.

It is a book about music, but also about systems-how they form, how they evolve, and how they come to define the very things they were built to carry.