SONIC BOOM: THE IMPOSSIBLE RISE OF WARNER BROS. RECORDS FROM HENDRIX TO FLEETWOOD MAC TO MADONNA TO PRINCE

The roster of Warner Bros Records and its subsidiary labels read like a list of Rock and Roll hall of Fame inductees: Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, James Taylor, Fleetwood Mac, the Eagle, Prince, Van Halen, Madonna, Tom Petty, R.E.M., the Red Hot Chili Peppers and many more. But the most compelling figures in the Warner Bros story are the sagacious Mo Ostin and the unlikely crew of hippies, eccentrics and enlightened execs he brought into the company.

Ostin and his staff transformed an out-of-touch company, revolutionized the industry, and, within just a few years, created the most successful record label in American music history.

How did they do it? One day in 1967, the newly-tapped label manager Mo Ostin called his team together to share his grand strategy: Stop trying to make hit records. 

"Let's just make good records, and we'll turn those into hits."

With that, Ostin ushered in a counterintuitive model that matched the counterculture. His offbeat crew recruited outsider artists and gave them free rein, while rejecting out-of-date methods of advertising, promotion and distribution. And the upstarts' experiments and innovations paid off, to the tune of hundreds of legendary hit albums.

Along with being the story of Warner Bros. Records’ rise, triumph, and fall, SONIC BOOM is an elegy to an era when unharnessed creativity was still welcome in American business. It’s an argument against the profit-obsessed standards of modern corporate culture and a reminder that the numbers on a profit-and-loss statement never tell the whole story.