If you like record-company memoirs that highlight the seedy side - executive cocaine binges, expense- account hookers and the ludicrous demands of pampered superstars - this droll, downbeat account of life in the belly of the corporate rock beast is not for you. Check out Walter Yetnikoff's graphic recollection of his exploits running Sony in the 1980s and 1990s,

Howling at the Moon, instead. By the time Dan Kennedy began working for the Warners label in New York in 2002, the party thrown by Yetnikoff and the other monstrous moguls was over. Illegal internet file-sharing and the major labels' snail-paced efforts to offer a legal online alternative had sent the record companies' cash cow, compact-disc sales, into steep decline. The budgets for debauchery had been slashed, and the colourful characters had been replaced by nervous marketing types, thrusting new-media opportunists, and Kennedy himself, an eager rock fan with a slim CV as a freelance advertising copywriter, grateful for his first regular paycheck.

Kennedy admits early on that his excitement at being taken on to devise TV ads and videos for Warners artists reflects “a delusion I have quietly indulged since age 30: that I am still as cool as I was when I was 17”, and that this is “how the tragedy of uncles who ‘still get high' happens”. Yet as soon as he begins working on his first assignment - Phil Collins's greatest hits - he twigs that, despite his impressive-sounding title as director of creative development, there is nothing very cool, or creative, about his new life. There are no drunken lunches or drug-fuelled nights on the town.

Unbeknown to Kennedy, music has turned into a business where the ruthless pursuit of a dwindling pot of money rules the thinking of everybody, even his childhood heroes. He is shocked to spot Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, dressed in a suit and tie, leaving a Wall Street meeting about the sale of the firm. The most authentically rock'n'roll moment in Kennedy's 18-month tenure occurs when he goes to an Iggy Pop gig and gets roundly abused in the company's VIP enclosure by the artist himself: “Betcha wish you weren't fat!Jump down here you fat f***s!”

The younger talents that Kennedy works with do not share this old-school anti-corporate stance. They are keen to get their snouts in the trough.

The R&B star Jewel secures a TV ad tie-in with the manufacturer of a lady's razor for her single Intuition, a song that Kennedy wryly notes appears to be “about not giving into the insane waves of advertising and greed that are shoved at us all day long”.

The comedy in Rock On owes more to The Office than it does to Spinal Tap. When Kennedy isn't trying to ape the street slang of the black hip-hop artist Fat Joe, or figure out the joke with the British cod-metal band the Darkness, he's in meetings. Tense and usually pointless affairs presided over by middle-aged types with passé haircuts and fake tans, these serve chiefly to expose how out of touch Warners' middle managers are with modern music. Their mutual hostility and mindless incantations about how “awesome” and “exciting” everything is barely conceal an anxiety that they are about to be fired.

And many of them, Kennedy included, are proved right after Warner Music is bought in 2004 by the billionaire Edgar Bronf-man, the heir to the Seagram drinks fortune. One of the best- observed episodes in the book occurs when Bronfman calls a meeting of the company to inform them they are no longer in the business of selling music; from now on, they will be selling “lifestyle”, in the form of merchandising. In fact, this refocusing seems to serve as a smokescreen behind which Warners' new proprietors can line their pockets, paying out $22.5m in salary and bonuses to the top five executives, while posting a profit of $7m and firing 1,000 staff.

A desperate, venal tale such as this needs a light touch, and Kennedy proves adept at supplying it. His narrative is a fractured mix of cameo scenes from the day job, the surreal daydreams that sprout from it, and satirical doodles - such as his suggested lyrics “for any all-girl rock band trying to win over the middle-aged suburban white male demographic”, which contain the couplet “I think your four-door rocks/I love those sandals with those socks”. In another impromptu riff about what stage “moves” lead singers need to adopt to impress big-label marketeers, Kennedy proposes “an odd combination of sexual advances with a temper tantrum, punctuated with moments of apparent hypoglycaemia”.

Kennedy is not, in real life, the bumbling ingénu he masquerades as in Rock On. A regular contri- butor to Dave Eggers's literary journal McSweeney's, and a performer of his own work at “spoken word” gigs around New York, he is a wise guy in geek's clothing. It's a measure of his book's success that this running gag neither palls nor distorts Kennedy's high-spirited obituary for the record business.

Rock On: How I Tried to Stop Caring About Music and Learn to Love Corporate Rock by Dan Kennedy

Harvill Secker £12.99 pp224

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