I think that the importance of popular music will diminish. When an art-form becomes something that many people can do, when the skills and qualities associated with it have been resolutely identified, analysed and perfected, it no longer retains one of its essential qualities: uniqueness.

For art to achieve consensus value it has to come across unique. The people who create it need to be doing something only a few can even if all they do is win a talent show. It is their exceptionalness that gives them legitimacy and authority, their passport to importance. Such conditions are evaporating in the present age and it is for this reason that I predict the end of popular music as a defining cultural reference within a generation.

This is not of course to proclaim the end of music itself, only new music with broad appeal. More significantly it means an end to the idea of greatness. To be great an artist had to be approved by the mass with its singular platform and its tendency to a singular view, a view which pretty much everyone recognised. With mass culture becoming infinitely fragmented then no artist can rise onto the platform because the platform itself is effectively being taken down. Without that platform there is no widely shared recognition of what is approved. That means no consensus and so I think it fair to say that the Age of Great is over. It is over at least for a while to be reinvented perhaps in another era.

Greatness has gone only in the sense that it is no longer possible to be currently great. The celebrated artists of the past aren’t going anywhere. They are preserved for posterity in recorded works. Their cachet will increase with time as their value gets passed down and rediscovered by each coming generation. And these are the defining characteristics of greatness I think: consensus then posterity. With no consensus there can be no posterity, so greatness in the arts with its need for mass acceptance might turn out only to have been a passing phenomenon specifically of the industrial age.

All the popular music forms as they have been fashioned so far are now exhausted. The music of the folk traditions, of classical, of jazz, of the multiple genres of the rock era, are now only revisited and homage paid to the masters of antiquity. There are no new movements on the horizon, and even if there were, with the dismantling of the mass platform they would have a problem being heard above the noise of self-expression brought about by the Internet, a platform which allows everything to be in the public domain. To achieve consensus in any large degree is becoming impossible.

It was truly exciting to be born into a great age as I was in 1956 when Miles Davis was on the cusp of producing his greatest work, Elvis had just happened and The Beatles were around the corner. The following three decades produced an explosion of musical imagination which rivalled anything that had come before it. Significantly this impressive flowering was cultivated in an elite environment. Only the chosen few from any pool of talent were given a voice. Their exclusive status made their appeal all the more alluring. While others were relegated to obscurity the “stars” shone all the more brightly, as much a consequence of their privileged status as their abilities. The rarified world of such elite players in the arts is passing being replaced by something much more devolved.

I don’t say any of this with foreboding. Music will always have its place. But for a while it is going to be defined by its posterity rather than its currency. This will be difficult for my generation to grasp, a generation brought up to consider greatness in contemporary music a part of the natural order. It was not always so. There were few to match Beethoven and Mozart in classical music throughout the 19th Century and no new towering greats in jazz since Davis and Coltrane. The Beatles are still the benchmark for pop and will probably remain so.

Music might now return to its traditional roots, to a participation activity in which anyone can be involved. Your community is just as likely to be a virtual one, connected through online networks. Artists who chose to follow the muse as a way of life may earn a modest income this way supported by those who want to hear their voice. But wiser counsel should probably discourage people from pursuing music as vocation because opportunities for success will be fewer in future. Obscurity is far more typical than ubiquity. It always was despite appearances to the contrary. And maybe it is no bad thing having greatness diminished over coming decades. For the preservation of art’s integrity there needs to be less of it in any case.