Tom Whitwell on the future of the music biz, a future that is remarkably slanted to what I'd been describing a few years back with my one-track universe, a future where pop-stars work hard for modest money, where the relationship star-to-fan is more than airplay and DRM-locks, where trading tracks are free-exchange tokens of tribal membership, and a future where record companies have a few essential clues about how the global social-networking post-boomer, post-massmarket world really works:

I've bought plenty of Grace Jones records with money. I'd happily pay more money to see her play a concert. Did anyone from her label email me to say she was playing in London on a Thursday night when I was at home watching Bonekickers? No. They took my money and didn't even get my name.
[ Why Should Rock Stars Expect To Be Rich? ]

The upshot of all this is an emerging new industry, a new arts-customer relationship industry, rethinking artists as the badge of a social network, and a new awareness that all it really takes is a deeper relationship with just 1000 real fans to bring an artist into a 6-figure income bracket, which, when you think about it, is not really all that very hard to do if you set your mind to it.

And also, when you stop to ponder the past 4 decades of star-mania, limos and strat-shaped swimming pools, considering the extreme toxicity of pop-stardom, is this new realism really such a bad thing?