Welcome To My World

Artrockers,

Being, as I am, a media superstar I'm often asked to answer questions for journalists and such-like about the state of the music industry; 'Is there a future? Can you make money from it? Hasn't the digital age finished off the biz?' - that sort of thing. The answers to the above tend to be; Yes. Yes and No.

Of course there's no denying that digitisation pulled the rug from beneath the majors, or they pulled the rug from beneath themselves by allowing greed to overrule common sense by trying, Canute like, to hold back the inevitable, but the characters who believed that they could keep charging whatever they liked for CDs, the characters behind scrapping the single release so you had to buy the over-priced CD album whether you wanted it or not, the characters who drove the consumer to acts of piracy, they've mostly gone, retired to Beverly Hills to smoke fat cigars. They won't be missed. There's a new realism about the majors, well there should be after the remorseless kicking they've had over the last decade, they haven't got a choice in the matter, this is the way of the world now - deal with it. And let's not kid ourselves, no majors = no music biz to speak of, the entire industry is dependent on the existence of the majors, take them away and you can say goodbye to the blanket coverage music gets from the media because, I'm afraid, it's all about the Benjamins. So it's in the interest of us all that the majors succeed, there is no Plan B that I'm aware of short of state subsidy...And nobody, surely, wants that.

But if I'm optimistic about the future of our industry then that optimism is predicated on one simple fact: things change. The MP3 certainly changed the business - totally - as did the CD in its time, and there is no reason to believe that the next new format won't do exactly the same thing. And make no mistake, there are scientist type folks all over the world working on that format right now, and for all we know that format will be irresistible to the consumer and, whisper it, a physical product. Why, we might even see the return of the music retailer to the high street, who knows?

There's everything to play for, nobody (that's nobody) knows where this will lead, the field is open, the MP3 is substandard and the prize will go to the quick. Vinyl, cassettes, 8 track, CDs, they've all come and gone and pretty soon I predict the MP3 will be joining them on the scrapheap.

Digital music caught the industry on the greedy hop, but they won't make that mistake again, they've been humbled, they've been the laughing stock of the western world...Rightly so. But the new breed of slimmed-down major is cuter than those old swine, they know what they have to do and they know that they have to invest in new formats rather than £10m parties.

So, just in case I haven't made myself sufficiently clear, It's all about the format stupid.

Tom Artrocker

PS Have a look at this:

3D sound without headphones, a clue to the future? Maybe.

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