The business around recorded music has for the last few years been undergoing the most fundamental change in its history. Since the 19th Century and Edison’s time the music industry has been able to generate wealth by turning performances and compositions into recorded copies that could be sold to the public in one format or another. This pay-per-unit model thrived until recently when it has been threatened by the Internet. The ability now to copy music and pass it around freely means that the century-old industrial process that took care of manufacture and distribution is increasingly redundant. Anyone can now produce and distribute their own work easily. With that the big music companies could be out of a job.

Now the problem is how can creative individuals in recorded music and their business partners turn their work into earnings. Its not just a question of how but whether. It may turn out that society no longer wants to pay for recorded music. Like poetry or photography or blogging it may remain a worthy activity but with largely no commercial value.

Whatever moves are made, whatever deals are done, clever or stupid, the next few years will determine the future. Most people don’t grasp the issues yet. Many have the standard reaction: that what is happening currently is some kind of moral outrage. They talk about how music is being “stolen” by unscrupulous down-loaders. Anyone applying the slightest intelligence knows that is nonsense. The outraged tend to talk as if this “stealing” is somehow denying them their income when the money they have made from their recordings down the years was miniscule anyway. It wouldn’t have kept them going in breakfast cereal. Yet they somehow want to stand by the old system as if it is some kind of sacred cow when it tended only to make a very small number of individuals very wealthy.

What exists at the moment is an opportunity to create a new environment. But that change could evolve different ways depending on how imaginative people in the music business are. As I say, it might be to condemn music recordings to the commercial dustbin. Or to be more optimistic, it could lead to a fairer distribution of the money society is prepared to award its music-makers. A reorganisation is conceivable whereby performers and composers could make modest amounts sufficient to sustain them. Although by no means a certainty this is a realistic possibility. There are many musicians such as myself who would be delighted to be able to pay the rent from their recorded works.

Ways of moving forward with that in mind should be sought, not inhibiting the process of change as the majority in the business seem to be doing, either by clinging to already outmoded thinking or in the case of the big players by suing their customers for embracing the future quicker than they have.