In his first attempt at a novel, Bill Flanagan, senior vice president and editorial director at VH1, writes about what he has known his entire professional career — the music industry.

“A&R” is written simply, with biting humor and poignant takes on the music of today. It is a good, informative read about the inner workings of the music scene.

The book centers around Jim Cantone, an up-and-comer in the music business who takes a job to head the Artists & Repertoire division at fictitious industry mongrel WorldWide Records.

The job for Cantone and other A&R representatives is to find new acts and bring them along until they are ready to cut a deal.

Cantone’s story runs parallel to that of a band he has been nurturing and still hopes to sign.

Jerusalem is a group for the new millennium.

Fronted by 22-year old Lilly Rope and backed by pretty boy Mack Toomey on the drums, the band appears to be on the cusp of stardom.

Cantone and others believe in Jerusalem, and his first order of business at WorldWide is to bring the band into his newfound family.

“A&R” is a depiction of all that has gone wrong in music. Throughout the novel, Cantone comes face to face with the greed the author believes now runs rampant in the music business.

He makes it clear that money runs the fictitious WorldWide. An artist is successful only as long as he or she is selling records.

Musical integrity and freedom to create will always take a back seat to the bottom line.

Even though WorldWide is owned by Swedish multinational NOA, the president of the corporation is still “Wild” Bill DeGaul, who started his career in the Brazilian jungle selling bossa nova and mambo albums. He eventually sold his booming industry to WorldWide.

DeGaul is still thought to be in the business for the music. He exemplifies this when he goes to a small show Jerusalem played before they were signed, thinking “these guys are gonna roll my socks up.”

“A&R” streams the many sub-plots of Cantone, DeGaul, vice president of WorldWide J. B. Booth and a host of others only to resolve them in the same pool of water at the end.

The artists who are rewarded financially in “A&R” are the people who are the mainstays in music. The mainstays in music are the people who have churned out the same genre for their entire careers. Creativity is not allowed unless it becomes the latest craze. “A&R” is a worthy addition to any music enthusiast’s book collection, and it has been widely read by artists as well.

R.E.M.’s Peter Buck believed it to be a funny and truthful book about the industry “and the ideals so easily lost when one loses sight of the music in pursuit of the business.”

Tom Petty called it a “beautiful chronicle” of all that is “wrong with rock and pop in recent decades. The perfectly sad story of the folks who picked all the golden apples and never bothered to water the tree.”