but how many of the millions of bands formed in bedrooms *ever* became the Rolling Stones?

Yeah, yeah, I know - one.

it actually means less Lear jets and corporate coke habits, as music will carry on, and people will still make it, dance to it, and watch it being performed. Dpownloading mean means making a massive profit on "2 oz of plastic with a hole in the middle" (or some electrons temporarily in a hard drive) has ceased to be a viable business plan. If this pays the musicians more and cuts out the middle men, I think that's a good thing. There was a time when the cost of making music and performing it required the cash back up of a big company - not any more.

but based on the initial post it does seem to suggest that the extreme success and opulence of the Rolling Stones model is something we as an audience should acquiesce to. I'm not sure I would sign up to that.

Surely the argument should be about access to good music - does this improve or deteriorate under the new model? I don't indulge in the download market to offer any real insight on that but it does seem to me that it has the potential for bands to make a living - rather than an obscene disproportionate wage - from their efforts and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Perhaps a comparison might be made with jazz where megasuccess is unusual but plenty of people seem to make a reasonable living and is able to serve what market there is.

Or maybe I'm full of ill-informed shit?

I wonder how the numbers of bands making money and record company execs making money match up, and what the amounts are.

When you look at the percentages, how contracts cut up the money then surely it's better or an artist if they're actually taking the lions share of a smaller amount rather than the microscopic wafer thin cut of the pie they get/got from major label contracts.

The biggest difference between the old and the new is the power of marketing though. The small artists who push the product themselves will never be able to have a huge marketing budget, which obviously can make a big difference.

I understand how this is a bad thing, obviously, and it's on a much much larger scale these days, but here's the thing. Having worked in and around the music industry it was always a perk of the job to get things for free, the latest albums in promo form, tickets to gigs etc etc. My sister worked in a specialist/second hand shop and huge amounts of their stock came from people working for labels, press (and none of the money made on stock in secondhand shops went anywhere near the artists or labels).

I wonder how many people who have received freebies, or bought second hand or taped off a friend feel about the whole download culture. Because it seems to me that music fans have been getting their fix without the artist seeing a penny for years. Never mind the amount of contracts and contract loopholes that allow labels to release things without paying anything to the artist.

Paying £80,000,000 to Robbie Williams (Robbie Williams, not The Beatles but Robbie Williams) may have had something to do about it as well.

in terms of record labels and big business, but it won't be the death of music.

People will always make music, regardless of the financial reward. You or I could make a demo and if it were genuinely good enough, could get it distributed and heard by thousands of people with no label involvement.

music wasn't doing too badly before the music industry.

No more Rolling Stones? Well, were they really any better than the man they found painting the ceiling at Chess?

It's a fact.
I remember this argument 10 or so years ago and the record companies started looking into measures to stop illegal downloading.
They all paid IT consultants a great deal of money to tell them what to do.
They were told, in much detail and business talk, that they would not be able to stop illeagal downloading and it would become more popular.
So they started putting copy protection software on cds, which they were told wouldn't work, but they did it anyway.
I know some record companies are now actively preparing themselves for a market environment where they give new music away as part of a concert ticket package, meaning artists will release music based around tour announcements.

now is less about flogging bits of plastic, paying out huge advances and buying 'fruit and flowers' for The Thrashing Doves.
The cost of recording stuff is a lot lower, and indeed bands can do much of the work in their back bedrooms and garages. What some Record Companies will become are more like promo agents, making deals to get bands music onto TV, films, adverts and so forth (I don't really know what "Glee" is but apparently a lot of music biz types are very keen to get their acts on the soundtrack).

There is still a million pound industry around CDs and downloads so I think think there's a few years left in that yet and I think it's a gross oversimplification to think that everyone wants music streamed into a box and nobody wants to own the artefact any more. A mate was telling me last night how her 5 year old's eyes lit up when she brought home her first CD!

The big one is what happens to the small-middle market. Smaller bands who haven't quite got the mass appeal to get good deals for their stuff. Older, established acts are going back out on the road, releasing old stuff or putting out archives and live stuff for their core of fans but I wonder how sustainable that is. A lot of my favourite acts make resolutely un-commercial music and don't perform live. What happens to them?

Maybe this is a topic for a podcast and I'd happily volunteer to do it and answer any questions in the guise of lukewarm industry "pundit" WHO HE? (if David or Fraser are reading, I'm back in London next week).

To take piracy as the single and only cause of labels' woes is, frankly, madness. I don't think there are many people at record labels who believe that. They agree (as do I) that piracy is an "issue" but there are so many factors at play here as to make your head spin.

For every study "proving" piracy leads to a lost sale, there is another that "proves" it makes fans buy more.

What, ultimately, we have is a record industry built on album sales (that's where the margins are and how contracts were measured) seeing that part of the business slide but other parts boom. Single sales, for example, are at an all time high, there's money from streaming, from games (well, not from Guitar Hero any more...), from mobile apps etc. but it's all a bit lopsided as the main bit of its income (album sales) have been hit, partly by piracy, partly by being able to just buy one single off an album as a download, partly by competition from "other lifestyle sectors" and so on it goes.

We are in a period of readjustment. The smart labels will adapt to the times and come back, maybe smaller, but hopefully stronger.

I, literally, could quack about this stuff for days but have to go and put the tea on. But if there's enough interest, we can do a podcast on it and "crowdsource" the questions here.

How very, impossibly, modern.

... would enjoy hearing Eamonn expound on the podcast, on this or any other topic.

He always gives good pod.

"Appetite for Self Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age" by Steve Knopper"

It's a couple of years old but as a history of how it all went wrong for the majors it's worth a read. As Eamonn suggests digital is part of it, but not all of it. The desperate clinging to an out of date business model; Steve Jobs finding new ways to sell hardware; the music business cutting out the record retailers; and so on and so on are all discussed. I commend it to the house.

The record companies are the ones suffering now, and here's why :

http://www.negativland.com/albini.html

Essentially, the band is the very last to get paid, and record companies always find reasons not to pay.

from Edwyn Collins' wife.

http://www.thedailyswarm.com/headlines/edwyn-collins-wifemanagers-excell...