Zoom-in Online

It's sometimes hard to get away from all the negativity swirling around the music industry these days.

Everywhere you look (and this space is most definitely included), everybody is talking about how the money's all gone, how it's never coming back, how nobody is ever going to pay for anything, how kids today are blasting their eardrums into oblivion, etc etc etc.

So imagine our surprise to find a piece entitled "The golden age of infinite music" on the BBC over the weekend. The editorial touched on a variety of topics, but its general point was that its author, John Harris, is excited to see what effects this essentially limitless access has on the next generation of music fans.

The mainstream media has (unsurprisingly) tended to avoid editorials like this, but the fact that it was written by Harris, a middle-aged music journalist who's written books about Britpop and rock 'n' roll mythology, may help explain how it managed to squeak onto the Beeb's website.

Though Harris casually makes some deeply disturbing points about changes in attention span ("Woe betide the act that decides to make the kind of record that tends to be charitably described as a 'grower,'") and the fate of his chosen profession ("given that the need to read reviews before deciding what to listen to is fading fast, I rather fear that even music journalists may be rendered irrelevant."), there are some fascinating cultural points that society, as a whole, ought to be excited about.

In describing the 20th century mode of music consumption, he highlights something that not enough people are talking about. "To be a true fan of a band took real dedication, access to obscure information - and, frankly, money."

A great deal of the popular musical canon (the longer-haired, more drug-addled Dead White Men) was nominated and confirmed by a very specific group of dudes (the normally middle-class white kids who could afford to buy dozens, and then hundreds, and then thousands of records). As the canon and its required listening list grew and grew, a chasm began to grow between what critics, who mostly felt compelled to have that knowledge, and their public, who mostly listened to what their parents had lying around the house, heard.

Thanks to the Internet, that chasm has been destroyed. If a critic pronounces that Fleet Foxes are deeply indebted to the Byrds, a young and curious listener can go see if said critic is right. "Clearly," Harris writes, "for anyone raised in the old world, the modern way of music consumption has all kinds of unforeseen benefits.

"A good example: though I've always heard plenty of talk about the utter awfulness of such infamous albums as Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music (a double album of guitar feedback and white noise) or Deep Purple's Concerto For Group And Orchestra (don't ask), I can now listen to them for nothing, and have an opinion of my own."

It's difficult to say what all of this means for the future of music writing, the value that our culture places on musicians or their craft. But if one curious kid who can't afford to spend $50 a week on music can get that same exposure for a lower price online, that's certainly something to be excited about.