Radiohead's Thom Yorke. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty
Like millions of others, I spent last Wednesday morning downloading and listening to Radiohead's latest album, In Rainbows. I'd already transferred it to my phone by the time I'd finished breakfast, and listened to it twice by the time I'd reached work. By 10am I had posted my erudite and well-considered thoughts on the album's merits on this very blog, and within 24 hours of the album's release, so had 200 others.
Whatever your take on Radiohead or their latest album, it's fair to say that the unusual distribution model they have used - a downloadable zip file for which you pay whatever you like - has made quite a splash in the already turbulent waters of the music industry. As such, it remains to be seen whether said music industry will heed the lessons of the album's undoubted success, or whether the big players will simply entrench themselves further in a fundamentally unwinnable campaign to dictate how and when musical distribution takes place.
A large part of me hopes for the latter scenario. In fact, this latest humbling blow to the boardroom execs might just be the sort of catalyst that brings popular music the self-possession it needs in order to establish itself as a proper art form.
Let me explain. Classical music - my specialist subject, for those just tuning in - predates the iPod and indeed the phonograph by quite a number of years, and its composer-centric tradition has somehow managed to survive the record industry's desire to produce easily marketable, demographically targeted content. Trends in classical music have always been set in the concert hall, never across a boardroom table, and contemporary classical music in particular has remained steadfastly defiant in the face of popular opinion. The market for such music is naturally very small - a marginal fraction of a marginal audience - but composers as uncompromisingly independent as Karlheinz Stockhausen, who gave record companies the heave-ho years ago, still manage to find their audience and make a decent living.
Popular music, on the other hand, has always been nurtured by the magnates and moguls who have ultimately benefited from its success, and for all the talk of rebellion and sticking it to the man, its top acts have been united in their willingness to sell themselves out in exchange for mass market potential. Sure, new ideas may have sprung up at the grassroots level - from blues to reggae to hip-hop - but the moment an untapped audience is discovered by the A&R men, the music is taken over, tamed and regurgitated in radio-friendly format for the undiscerning masses.
Perhaps, encouraged by Radiohead's latest example, more bands and solo artists will feel free to find their own audiences rather than relying on the pre-assembled segments and clusters that constitute the current music world. Only when so-called popular music stops trying to win the endless chart-based popularity contests that give it its name can it truly begin to grow up and start being taken seriously as an art form.
