The 20 Biggest Record Company Screw-Ups of All Time

Jon Dolan, Josh Eells, and Fred Goodman at Blender Magazine considered the music industry's twenty biggest gaffes, from Geffen's investment in Guns and Roses' ever-elusive Chinese Democracy album to the radio payola scandal.

Not even Thomas Edison is spared. Apparently, the phonograph inventor and record label head was no fan of jazz or music interoperability:

#17 Thomas Edison disses jazz, industry standards
America'smost famous inventor, and the creator of the phonograph, also had hisown record label: National Phonograph Company, later Edison Records.
Naturally, it was the biggest one around at first but made two fatalerrors. One was that Edison Records worked only on Edison's players [ed. note – sort of like most songs in the iTunes store],
while other manufacturers' conformed to the industry standard andworked interchangeably. The other was that Edison let his personaltaste govern Edison releases—and he hated jazz: "I always play jazzrecords backwards," he sniffed. "They sound better that way." So afterreleasing the world’s first jazz recording—Collins and Harlan's "ThatFunny Jas Band From Dixieland"—the company spurned the craze in favorof waltzes and foxtrots. Edison Records folded in October 1929.
Unintended consequence Edison adds "tin-eared A&R" to his list of inventions.

Topping the list, of course, is the labels' rejection of Napster's offer to pay one billion dollars to continue to run its file sharing network for five years.

Blender's 20 Biggest Record Company Screw-Ups of All Time

(Speaking of Blender, hopefully their crowd control team will be in better form at this year's SXSW than they were last year.)