my (ill?)informed thoughts on the music industry

Downloading - just like home taping before it - isn't killing music. Quite the reverse, in fact, and the music industry needs to embrace downloading if it is to survive in this current climate. iTunes and others like it are but small steps in the right direction - the model on which they're based is far from perfect (in fact the industry has much to be worried about in that they 'break' the album concept), but it's a start. What - if anything - is killing music is the globalisation of record companies into a few, huge multinationals and the resultant fracturing of already strained relationships with artists who are no longer treated as creators of art, progenitors of social change but as content providers. The sleeve notes to Dexys Midnight Runners' "Liars A To E" sagely inform us that (I'm paraphrasing) music never can invoke great change but that it needn't be so proudly disposable, so much aural bubblegum. Written in the '80s, never have these words rung so true.