In many ways, the trials and tribulations the recording industry is experiencing now have already been experienced by the print industry. In another post I've used this analogy, but briefly, the boom of PCs and desktop publishing in the nineties sparked the massive decentralisation of printing, and many printing firms disappeared. This decentralisation was accompanied by reams of ugly, garish and unprofessional printed matter, because having the means didn't automatically ensure the quality. Many would-be publishers and editors did not have, and did not realise they should have, the grammatical and graphical skills to produce a good product.
Does this all sound familiar? Simply scratch out "printing" and insert "recording", and you get a snapshot of the recording industry.
However, there is still a role for publishing houses and printing firms, and many are still doing really well. That is because (a) people still buy books and read magazines, and (b) there is a role that has assumed greater importance; that of 'repairing' material provided by enthusiastic but clueless amateur publishers.
The parallel in the recording industry, as noted in the article, is the ongoing work that keeps mastering houses busy and their thankless task in 'repairing' the work spawned from the swelling numbers of equally enthusiastic but clueless home studios.
The difference, though, is in the distribution of the final product. While there are online versions of newspapers, magazines and novels, the interest in these is minute compared to the online trade in MP3s and the decline in CD sales.
Associated with this is the difficulty of adapting copyright laws, framed in an era when infringement and enforcement was considerably less ambiguous, to the shadowy immediacy of the internet.
When you couple this with a pervasive cultural of entitlement ("I want it, therefore I can have it"), it is really difficult to predict the future of recorded music.
The "industrialisation" of music started with the phonograph in 1877, for whom we can thank Thomas Edison, and has tripped along nicely for about a century. It has only seriously been challenged in the last fifteen years or so. Perhaps we may revert to a post-industrial era that could resemble a pre-industrial era. The MP3s that we swap will become the equivalent of the wandering minstrels and the material that was transmitted and remembered orally. The concept of an 'album' may eventually disappear altogether.
