Music industry? It is not the end.

The downfall of the music industry is at the forefront of anyone's mind who enjoys music or would like a career in the biz. Formats are changing, physical sales are speedily declining, music download thieves are rife and online streaming programmes means there's less money circulating around the industry. That precise observation is something that industry bigwigs are going to have to come to terms with if they don't want to cock up what's left of the music culture.

I'm not writing this as a music fan, who is very happy that I can stream tunes from Spotify and easily download illegal songs, transfer them on to my mp3 player and shun any guilt that may befall me when I hear that great band's album before it's released.. because... despite that being the case now, this behaviour will make it impossible to sustain the music industry for much longer. Which is why I don't understand why music execs seem to be sitting on their arses and not cracking down (no pun intended) on this behaviour that resonates throughout the globe.

Firstly, why bother with three strikes when it comes to catching illegal downloaders? The judge in a local magistrates wouldn't apply this rule to someone who just mugged an old woman, so why use it for something that's equally illegal? Also, if anybody can let me know why Limewire hasn't been shut down yet, I'd love to know. Why doesn't Sony get the work experience guy to spend a day searching for such applications and forwarding the results to the person who can pull their plugs?

The mathematics is this: illegal downloads + less sales = less money for the artists. Pop fans (myself included) harp up and say, "Well this is fine, the money's in live music". Well I had a long think about this in the shower, I concluded that this is true for major pop stars, some of them could probably take a cut of money out their wages, it'll be a long time before they're seen down at the Jobcentre. For obscure or new bands, their journey to making enough money to sustain a career of music will be more troublesome but I completely disagree with the opinion it's all over for them. I think it might even be a good thing.

The perceived problem for smaller bands, new bands, obscure bands is that if people are illegally downloading their material, they're making no money out of sales, so they can't afford to tour and make more music and will eventually disband. Well the internet is a wonderful thing, it should be made easier for bands to set up their own "music shop" on their websites or a collective music shop for similar sounding artists.

I realise that these smaller bands will not have much by way of promotion, but even now, fans of this music don't just stumble across music on Smash Hits or Radio 1, they go looking for it. There are still plenty of platforms to promote music on the internet.. YouTube, MySpace, Facebook etc. If there were multiple genre music shops dotted about the internet, there could be a download chart on there too.

Even if it cost a bit of money, this would filter out all the amateurish, musical crap from people who just fancied being in a band for a day and whack up a track or two on Myspace. It'd leave the dedicated musicians to have a real shot at being successful. Yes it would be a longer process of raising the money to properly record songs, promote them, sell them and then go on tour and hope for the best, but it's still possible.

I also think that the concept of a weekly music magazine is old-fashioned. Why would you pay to view pages about music when you can the multi-media experience of the internet for free? Advertising revenues would increase and more money would be accumulated if professional blogs and music websites charged for their content (I'm speaking from a music biz viewpoint here, not a music fan). Then maybe a monthly magazine with a round up and physical gifts/cd/whatever would flourish alongside it. If this happened, I would have no qualms in paying a subscription for Popjustice.

We've got it good with Spotify too, all that free music for a couple of adverts every 20mins? Bargain! Warner have come out claiming it's had a damaging effect on sales and of course it would. It's an incredible discovery for music fans but record companies have been forced to sign up to it because it's a last ditch attempt at making money out of music. If I wanted to bleed every penny I could out of the music buying public, I'd allow the singles from bands/artists to be available on Spotify but then charge to listen/download the album.. like back in the old days when a single, on one level, was a promotional tool for the album.

We are living in the golden age of media freebies.. free films, free music, free tv programmes... it can't last much longer if top bosses want to maximise profit for their companies. Music industry chiefs need to accept that music is not the focal point of youth culture anymore, it is inevitable that there just cannot be as much money lining their pockets. Once this is firmly etched into their brains, they can begin to think of way to drain money out of a new era in music consumption. It is not the end.