These are the last gasps of a dying grotesque giant, the last bullying action of a middleman nobody needs any more. Market forces will dictate that, despite their best efforts, the traditional record company will no longer be a viable business in the years ahead.

As I see it, we're in the earliest stages of online music distribution overshadowing traditional album based forms (as different from the rampant illegal downloading of albums, which is another thoroughly interesting subject).

I'm thinking artists like Major Seven and the Minors, who present their material on their home page as a "collection of songs", with no physical media involved at any stage. First of all, this requires a shift in thinking for audiences, especially audiences weaned on albums, conditioned into expecting music presented in a certain standard format.

The kids, as ever, learn faster.

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Now, I think that the primordial soup of an anarchic internet is not going to last, indeed, I don't think anybody reasonably believes it will. This happens to be a very special time when the traditional industry - swooning from its inability to maintain scarcity and command prices - has been entirely unable to get in at the ground floor.

However, like in all random systems, things eventually nucleate.

A blog which I've cadged some good recommendations off is a blog I'll visit again and recommend to others. Nobody can trawl the vast, disorganised, fragmented network on their own. There is a demand for tastemakers, and tastemakers will surely come into existence.

Blogs are the new DJs.

Some of this will, in time, turn into a new industry. You can see how a blog with a substantial readership might expect some amount of money in return for the service. It probably won't be in the form of regular payments, but it might be something like a PayPal donation system, in line with the emergent internet ethics that seem to be working so well for such highly successful services as Wikipedia, which, by its very open nature and anarchic, organic approach to growth, has now beaten into oblivion the traditional models such as Encarta - and here's the rub - done so in spite of poorer quality control.

Radiohead have famously begun to explore such options, and while they aren't a good example because they've earned their fame in the "old idiom", so to speak, it would still be interesting to observe how well they fare.

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Couple this with the fact that the home computer is slowly becoming the one-stop source of all entertainment, and there is an entirely unpredictable new set of natural laws to deal with.

This is a weird and wonderful time in the history of music distribution and consumption. The outcome of these processes will dictate how the music of this century will be made in the same way that LPs changed the way music was made in the last century.

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I am looking forward to great things.

angshu

Jon Can Dance