He's got a lot of Eminence Front

Ever since Dylan went electric, pop music has been riven by a supposed rift between, well, not many people, actually, and those who have a passionate belief that music's life and soul rests not at the top of the charts but deep in the weeds. As much as I personally think that X-Factor and its excremental clan have all the artistic merit of toothpaste, there are those who believe with equal advocacy that music can be only regarded as valid if it is racked in the converted milk crates of an independent record shop or squeezed into the corner of a pub by a progressively-minded landlord pursuing his belief in promoting live music.

Taking at least one foot out of the stirrups of my own high horse, if there is one good thing to both the TV "talent" shows and the continuing existence of independent music outlets, it's that they are both still, in their own way, promoting the idea that becoming a musician is a sound aspiration that you can actually make a living out of.

The fate of the independent record shop comes into sharp focus this week in the UK with the opening of Sound It Out, a documentary by film maker Jeanie Finlay about Sound It Out Records, the very last record shop open in her native Stockton-on-Tees in north-east England.

Premiered earlier this year at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, this "accidental" film, as Finlay calls it, has been acclaimed, both for its depiction of smalltown English life, but also for its championing of the independent vinyl retailer - and the genuine eccentrics you're likely to meet there.

It is, says Finlay, "A distinctive, funny and intimate film about men, obsession and the irreplaceable role music plays in our lives. High Fidelity with a Northern accent." Shops like Sound It Out Records are dying at an alarming rate of 30 a year. This is partly due to the general decline in ownership of music in physical formats, but partly because a loophole in VAT has allowed the big online music retailers to operate offshore, VAT-free and offering cheaper retail prices (and without the overheads of a bricks-and-mortar operation).

"I’ve confirmed what I always suspected," she adds, "it’s so much more than just music and records. Vinyl holds memories and maps the soundtrack of people’s lives. You probably can’t remember when you downloaded an MP3 but I bet you can remember where and when you bought your first single, or the LP you fell in love to. People gravitate to the shop for a number of reasons, for [manager] Tom’s expertise, for the music he stocks and to just simply hang out in a place where they fit in."

Earlier this week, Pete Townshend - The Who's principal songwriter, windmilling guitarist and perennial Mod - delivered the inaugural John Peel Lecture, in itself a tribute to the legendary DJ who was as much a curator of the sort of music you'll find in Sound It Out Reords as radio personality playing it.

Peel, Townshend argued, represented a behaviour under-served today by mainstream radio's reluctance to abandon formula and go off range in the way the late DJ did. Peel played what either intrigued him, amused him, moved him or provided the perverted satisfaction of baffling and challenging the listening audience in equal measure.

"Peel was not a musician," Townshend said. "He was a listener, a patron of the arts, a broadcaster with almost no censorial mandate or agenda. He only played what he thought deserved to be played. I don't think it always mattered that he himself liked it. In China in Chairman Mao's day he might have been sent to prison if only for being the first to play Jesus and Mary Chain, the Undertones or the Proclaimers – all of them were a little bit political, but also radical and outspoken."

The lecture wasn't however, meant to eulogise Peel but to raise the flag - hoisted so often in recent years - about the new digital music culture and its impact on musical income, creativity and the somewhat hippyish ideals of what he called "John Peelism" - i.e. the free love of any form of music without condition. Sounding dangerously Luddite for a musician who has always been fascinated by new technology (the arpeggiated and synthesised organ on The Who's Won't Get Fooled Again was well ahead of its time), Townshend hypothesised that in the iTunes era online music services were simply providing a distribution and royalty collection model which was denying artists essential services.

"Music publishing has always been a form of banking," Townshend argued, "but – in cooperation with record labels – active artists have always received from the music industry banking system more than banking." He said that by essentially acting as nothing more than a brokerage for music, services like iTunes were denying artists the ecosystem that they would have traditionally been a part of, with labels and publishers providing editorial guidance, financial support, creative nurturing, manufacturing, publishing, marketing, distribution and royalty payments.

It is certainly true that with the disappearance of legendary impresarios like Ahmet Ertegun, and the replacement of music-minded record company CEOs with lawyers, investment bankers and similar forms of besuited chinless wonder who might consider Michael Bublé cutting edge, new artists today might lack the patient tutorage their ancestors enjoyed in the pre-digital era.

Today, Townshend said, the iTunes only offered a distribution and royalty collection platform. Taking his banking analogy, you could agree that the High Street bank - where a friendly (or unfriendly) bank manager might offer you a personal approach to managing your finances  - has disappeared, and that banking today revolves around an impersonal experience of ATMs, direct debits and online banking whereby there is little human or emotional involvement.

Hiding behind the semi-fictional persona of "the inner artist", Townshend laid into Steve Jobs (annoyingly and, I suspect, quite deliberately pronouncing his name as the Biblical "Jobes"), branding  iTunes a "digital vampire", a headline-friendly provocation if ever I've seen one.

Apple - and iTunes - came up with a workable model for online content distribution. It may not be entirely equitable to the artists, but I'd vouch that there were never any record labels or music publishers who designed contracts to be philanthropically beneficial to the artist.

This is not the first time, however, that iTunes has come in for criticism from an artist: AC/DC still refuse to distribute their music via the service on the grounds that it caters for people who want to download individual tracks rather than complete albums. One American blues-rock legend I ran into last year complained to me that the process of negotiating a distribution agreement with Apple is frustrating, to the extent he felt that he was being offered one of those "it's this or nothing" deals.

But for others, more pragmatically, they consider it to be an essential distribution mechanism, "a no brainer", another artist recently told me. It's there, people use it, you get money from it. Job done. As Michael Corleone famously told his brother Sonny: "It's not personal. It's strictly business". Pop music has always had its hardball types, and Apple is no different to any record company or music distributor that has come before. You still need to promote an album, you still need to perform live, you still - for the time being - need to have the means to sell CDs via High Street retail outlets.

The worry is that today, the music industry as a whole appears to have forgotten what it was that turned music into the predominant youth culture of the late 20th century. At least Steve Jobs, the archetypal Baby Boomer with his love of The Beatles, got it and did something about it. The music industry, frankly, took too long to embrace the digital age. When labels like EMI were still farting around appointing 'Executive Vice-Presidents of Digital Development' simply to "explore" the potential for digital music distribution, illegal file-sharing services were already in their prime and the horse was so far out of the stable that the stable door hinges had rusted away.

In branding iTunes a vampire, Townshend diminished attention for the more interesting argument of his thesis, that iTunes should do more to promote new artists. In this, I couldn't agree more. If I am to reluctantly give up the Saturday afternoon pleasure of browsing the racks of my local Sound It Out Records for browsing with a mouse (actually, it's now an Apple Trackpad), then at least do something to editorially draw my attention away from the FMCG brands like Coldplay and create attention for the emergent and the interesting. To Townshend's point, iTunes needs its own John Peel, someone who's curatorial mind can see potential whereas others might only see a long haul with limited return. Peel, while he bludgeoned on with patronage of bands like The Fall - such was his whimsy - had also been unafraid of championing the likes of Pink Floyd, The Faces and Roxy Music when they were regarded as either too avant-garde or simply unfashionable in their earlier years.

Rock stars - especially wealthy ones, pontificating over the inequalities of the "Wild West frontier", as Townshend somewhat anachronistically referred to the digital domain - will always appear to be arguing a fairly thin position. Although he "doesn't give a shit about money", as The Who's principal songwriter, his well-appointed mansion in East Twickenham (in a street backing on to where I used to live, if you must know) has been paid for by the likes of me buying original Who albums and then, in moments of weakness, buying them all over again when the box sets and digital remastered versions emerge.

I admire his passion for championing the need for iTunes as another element of the music distribution landscape to do more to keep the wolf from the door of those struggling to get on or up the ladder. But in the outcome, Townshend's lecture came across as no more than another old head bemoaning the march of progress.

Oddly enough, there's a box set containing a remastered Quadrophenia heading for your local record emporium. Just in time for Christmas.

Slipped Discs

The word portmanteau has a French origin, which is ironic as whoever first coined the frankly crap portmanteau "staycation" was unaware that the French have been holidaying at home for generations. And with 3,500 kilometres of coastline to call their own, you can't blame them.

Being August, Paris has cleared out. It's not quite I Am Legend empty - plenty of tourists are still taking on waiters in the locally popular game of 'I Know He Knows I Can See Him...But I'm Still Not Getting Served'. Parking is a treat, too. The spaces along the avenues are now large enough to actually park a car in them. My office is considerably more sparse. Like the Marie Celeste. Most of my colleagues have disappeared south - for the entire month - to jostle elbow-to-elbow with each other for a square metre of sand to call their own.

In their absence, I'm getting things done. Catching up. Stealing a march on the To Do list that will only intensify again in September. And, it would appear, Her Majesty's Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is doing much the same thing.

Amid last week's news of another global financial meltdown came word that HMG is to end the arcane and, frankly, useless laws which govern digital copyright. Until now, if you have ripped a CD to your iPod or compressed a DVD for your laptop, you should by rights be currently trading tobacco in the exercise yard of one of Her Majesty's other noble establishments.

More than a quarter of the British population owns an MP3 player today, PC ownership is more than three-quarters of UK households, and 55% of Britons have admitted to copying CDs onto their PCs, so the country's prisons should be bursting at the seams with digital pirates. But in a rare outbreak of political common sense, the British government has agreed to implement a number of proposals from the Hargreaves Review on digital copyright. Amongst them is the legalisation of 'format shifting' CDs and DVDs on to portable devices, on which we can continue to enjoy our legally-bought purchases in more convenient locations.

"This move will bring copyright law into line with the real world, and with consumers’ reasonable expectations,” said Vince Cable, the UK minister for business who might also now be entitled to use 'HDMI' as his middle name. While this is hardly the repeal of the Corn Laws, it is a small victory for libertarians, and an equally small victory for those of us who always considered the digital copyright law - which is rooted in an Act of Parliament first passed in 1709 - utterly irrelevant in the 21st Century.

"The [Hargreaves] review pointed out that if you have a situation where 90% of your population is doing something, then it's not really a very good law," Simon Levine, head of the intellectual property and technology group at DLA Piper told the BBC. This argument is reminiscent of the immovable digital force which made a mockery of Ryan Giggs' super-injunction some weeks back. All of which also highlights the somewhat lawless frontier that digital technology has opened up.

Encouragingly, the proposals have been blessed by UK Music, the industry association headed up by former Undertone Feargal Sharkey. "The music industry has no problem with private copying or format-shifting, so long as it doesn’t put UK artists and composers at a disadvantage to the rest of Europe," UK Music said in a statement on its website. "Our quarrel is not with consumers. They should be free to enjoy the CDs they bought on the devices they own."

Progress, then. During the 1980s, UK Music's fellow industry body, the BPI, staged a Kanute-like campaign which had the dust sleeves of vinyl records emblazoned with a cassette-and-crossbones logo and the alarmist legend HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC. It wasn't.

The music industry fought bravely to stop what it felt was a popular practice that was denying artists profits and, presumably, impacting the cocaine habits of hundreds of record company executives. Guess what? The music industry carried on making money by the sackload.

Unfortunately, today it is not. Digital and physical album sales fell by 7% in 2010, with CD sales dropping by by 12.4% - the sixth consecutive year music sales have declined. Sales and rentals of DVDs fell by a similar figure. Bricks-and-mortar record and video shops are closing hand-over-fist - HMV is planning to sell or close 60 of its outlets in the course of this year.

Even car manufacturers are acknowledging that music is more likely to be found these days on a flash memory card or a USB stick, and are providing inputs for both in vehicles. Ford has even rung the death knell of the in-car CD by announcing that it will drop line-fit disc players from its cars. So, now that it's legal to create an MP3-CD to play in the car, you soon won't be able to.

As magnanimous a gesture of common sense as the legalisation of format shifting is, it has clearly come on the downslope of the optical disc format. A technology first conceived by a Philips researcher in 1969 is on its way out. Apart from the last huzzah that is Blu-ray Disc, ownership of physical media just isn't popular anymore. True, there are still Luddites like me attached to the tactile experience of opening up a jewel case and reading the sleeve notes but - as What Would David Bowie Do? documented last October - even I've embraced online distribution and downsized my disc library.

I now have a fast, 100-gigabyte, fibre-optic Internet connection. I rarely use a car these days. All the TV and movies I could ever watch at home are available to download  easily and quickly, and straight on to my laptop, iPad or phone. Which means that if I do ever take a holiday this year, I'll be taking my entertainment with me legally. Not that it ever bothered me before...