The Music Business c.130,000 BC - AD 2007

The Music Business, that offshoot of capitalism that took one of the finest art forms ever created and turned it into a means of producing untold profit for a handful of tone-deaf accountants and Bono, has stuffed its last royalty cheque up its nose with the news that the members of Radiohead are allowing fans to download their new album, In Rainbows, for as little⁽¹⁾ as they like.

From the dawn of man, Ug the Yodeller was using his crude larynx and small brain to hum simple melodies to himself even before he could string a sentence together (a tradition honoured by many stars of the popular music scene even to this day). When he started banging rocks together he found a new way to keep warm - dancing to the new beat around the collection of kindling and logs still forlornly awaiting the emission of a single spark, while a Neanderthal with well-tailored animal-skins, a bigger cave and a much younger girlfriend went round with a hat collecting "contributions".

For millennia, mankind thrilled to the sound of a skilful melody or well-modulated chorus, or sobbed its heart out to a minor-keyed dirge - especially when they discovered that the rights to their minor-keyed dirge had been bought by a large corporation and used to promote a mobile phone company.

As classical composers relied heavily on wealthy patrons to finance their musical exploration, so modern musicians strove to make it to the toppermost of the poppermost, all the while investing their hearts and souls... in the financial security of their managers, music companies and drug-dealers. While many still made music for their own amusement⁽⁵⁾ there were always those willing to capitalise on the fruits of introspective creative types ability to play G-C-D on the mastodon marimba / lute / Stylophone... namely managers, music companies and drug-dealers.

Record companies became increasingly adept at maximising their return from musicians. If legendary bluesman Robert Johnson had walked on past that famous crossroads to the big house on the hill with the jacuzzi full of models he may have come away with less talent than the Devil offered him, but he would at least have been offered a small advance which he would never be able to repay to record an album of duets with Elaine Paige.

By the 1970s and 80s music lovers were ignoring The Music Business's warning that home-taping was killing music, preferring to believe that Peters and Lee, The Goombay Dance Band and Milli Vanilli were murdering music without any need for assistance. By the noughties, as more and more artists dared to seize control of their own work, fans were able to cut out the corporate middlemen and keep the music fresh and real, buying or downloading their favourite tracks direct from bands' websites⁽⁶⁾ - or even cut out the bands as well by downloading from their peers' hard disks with Napster, Kazaa, Limewire et al. As The Music Business began to whine about being ripped off, bands even began to offer their music for free on MySpace thanks to the generosity of notoriously hippyish, not-for-profit flowerchild Rupert Murdoch.

Despite a last-gasp attempt to milk the final few millions from the musical cash-cow with televised karaoke contests in which the bullying to the point of tears of the mentally-ill, tone-deaf and celebrity-obsessed was confused (for money) with the abstraction and analysis of the human condition through organised sound, the Last Post had been illegally ripped for free and sounded.

With everyone now able to knock out a new choon on GarageBand and post it on t'internet where it could be lovingly ignored by millions, The Music Business began to resemble an over-developed dinosaur, with poor eyesight and under-developed teeth, sadly munching on a few leaves in the moments before the giant asteroid struck Earth. So when Radiohead decided to give their album away for free - aided only slightly by the squillions the band had already earned from conventional releases - The Music Business held its last A & R convention in the Bahamas and choked to death on its own vomit in the wee small hours of the morning whilst listening to a loop of the opening instrumental bars of Pink Floyd's Money mixed with the opening bars of the late, great Ronnie Hazelhurst's theme from Are You Being Served?

The Music Business will be buried at the Church of St Matthew the Accountant. The service will be conducted by the Reverend Simon Cowell and the congregation will sing The Sound of Silence by Gareth Gates, just as soon as the lawyers can work out who owns the rights. The Music Business is survived by Music. And Simon Cowell.

⁽¹⁾ or as much...^(2)
(2) or they can buy the box set for £40 / $80...^(3)
(3) if they're sad obsessives with no lives...^(4)
(4) what's that you say? "They're Radiohead fans"? I take your point.
⁽⁵⁾ in James Blunt's case the "laughing at the tone-deaf and cretinous nature of his fan base all the way to the bank" kind of amusement.
⁽⁶⁾ the most popular download of all time being the 23'19" version of Mike's Fallen off the Stage Again Jam by Phish, recorded in the third set of the second night at the Timothy Leary Amphitheater, Berkley, CA - rendered totally different from the previous night's version by an angry shout during Trey's fifth solo of "Hey, you played that last night, man!" followed by the sound of a man in his late 30s in a tie-dye T-shirt being beaten to death with his own glowstick for "Like, ruining the mellow vibe, dude".