OK, let's get this straight: If you are a fan of real music, if you love the sound of real musicianship being used to express genuinely original musical ideas in any or every style from Metallica to Mile Davis; Hank Williams to Mozart; Radiohead to Count Basie, then you should shout a big "HURRAY" for the likes of Fame Academy, Pop Idol, Justin Timberlake and all the rest of the facile, shallow, manufactured, excretia spewed out by the music industry each year.

And this is why... We (the human race) are going through a revolution at the moment. It's called the information revolution, and in it's way it's as big an upheaval as the industrial revolution was a couple of hundred years ago. It is changing the way we work, it is changing the way businesses operate, and it is making some businesses - or even whole industries - obsolete. Just as James Watt's steam engine sounded the death knell for the water-mill, and the invention of the railway spelled hard times for the canal owners, then it has to be seen that every time there is progress, there are going to be economic casualties.

There are always some who will try to swim against the tide. Those who have a vested interest in denying that things are changing, clinging desperately to the old, outmoded ways of doing things. During the industrial revolution, these people were called Luddites (after their leader, one Ned Ludd). They went around smashing steam engines, wrecking cotton mills and setting fire to factories. Why? Because they stood to lose their livelihoods as a result of the new technologies that were emerging. Ultimately they were unsuccessful - the tide of progress cannot be held back, no matter how much we all might sometimes wish otherwise. The Luddites of the information age are the record company executives who took a sledgehammer to Napster and are trying to bestow the same fate on the other methods of file sharing that took it's place.

Once upon a time, to be a record label exec was to wield ultimate power over both the artist and the consumer. You decided who got to share their music with the rest of the world. You decided how much the music fans would have to pay to listen to their favourite bands/artists. You might have got a little hot under the collar at the thought of people taping their LPs to cassette for each other, but by and large you ruled the roost. Never mind that a CD costs the same as a cassette to manufacture, we're gonna sell it for close on double the price... our justification? Because we can! Sorry guys, but "the times they are a changing", as the man said.

Nowadays, we are less inclined to spend the £15 or so on a CD if we can download it for free. I'm not saying that this is right (as a professional musician myself, I expect to receive payment for my time & effort - we all have to pay the rent, after all), I'm just reflecting the reality of the current situation, i.e. that music fans are no longer at the mercy of the corporate monoliths who have had an exclusive say on what we listen to and how much we have to pay for the privilege, for far too long. Also, is anyone else sick of hearing the "file-sharing will hurt musicians" argument? The majority of music downloaded by file sharers tends to be of the "back-catalogue" variety i.e. songs that were originally released years ago, and have been shamelessly repackaged by record labels ever since. The policy seems to go something like this: Every five years (or even less) take an artists "Greatest Hits" collection, add a couple of tracks, take away a couple of others, re-do the artwork think of a slightly different title for the collection & sell it as a full price new release. Often this is done without a penny going to the artists who played on the original recording, so it seems a little disingenuous of the record labels to claim that file sharing is taking the food from musicians mouths.

All that file sharing has done, in the main, has been to remove the ability of record companies to milk their back-catalogues to death. Rest assured, if they could have thought of a way of making us buy our music collections all over again (as happened in the mid-late '80s with the introduction of CDs), at full price they would have had few qualms. Remember Tommy Lee Jones in "MEN IN BLACK" where he's discussing new technologies brought to Earth by aliens: "This is gonna replace CDs soon. I guess I'm gonna have to buy The White Album again." Well the truth is that the format which is beginning to replace the CD - the mp3, has been the only significant development in music reproduction technology that the record industry HASN'T been able to use to fleece it's customer base. Boy, do they hate that!

Aspiring bands and artists now have the power to share their music with the world without the help of a record company. All it takes is a PC, some relatively inexpensive software, a generous helping of talent and you can be showcasing your music to your potential fan base via the world-wide-web. How (or indeed whether) it will be possible for musicians to make the same kind of money as the Michael Jacksons of this world by doing this without the "help" of a record label remains to be seen. Here is one view of how the future could look though:

A band records an album on it's own label & sets up a web site to market it.

If the music is any good, people visit the web site & are prepared to pay a small amount to own a copy of that music.

Eventually, a lot of people hear about the band & their songs start being traded via Emule, Kazaa etc. However, if the cost of owning the music legitimately is significantly less than it is at the moment (because there are no corporate Luddites who need a cut), then a lot more people will be prepared to pay up. The fact is that many folks who download stuff at the moment do so partially because they feel that record companies have been ripping them off for years. There is an element of "F**k YOU" directed at every corporate fat-cat in each download. Remove this motivation, reduce the price of the product and file sharing will not be a barrier to musicians making a living from their talent (if it ever was).

So what has any of this got to do with Justin Timberlake? Well, when the original Luddites realised that their livelihoods were in danger, they retaliated. They were doomed to failure, but they retaliated anyway. The modern Luddites, though also doomed, are fighting back too. Their principal weapon is the sledgehammer of a lawsuit. The problem is that whilst they fight against the tide of progress, they are unwilling to take a chance on ORGINAL talent i.e. something that hasn't been heard before. In essence, why take the risk of developing and nurturing a genuinely ground breaking new band, when all we gotta do to make a profit is go after the teeny-bopper market?

You have to realise that every time you hear a shallow reworking of an old tune on the radio, every time you turn on the TV to find yet another Britney-alike pouting at the camera lens, every time you see Top of the Pops filled with a succession of dance-troupes wearing headset microphones whilst lip-syncing to some god-awful luurrve song ballad, what you are actually witnessing is the death of the music business as we know it. For those with talent it is now possible (although, admittedly not easy... yet) to do without a record label. The record companies are running scared, they know their best years are behind them and the industry they represent is changing beyond recognition as we speak. Britney, Justin, Christina & co. are the evidence of this. Let them have their fifteen minutes while they can.

This article copyright © John Robson 2003