The Music Business and the Big Flip is Clay Shirky's latest essay on how all but the middle third of the music industry is now digital and in largely amateur control, and how, in a "publish first, filter later" distributed content delivery system, everybody wins.

Digital changes in music have given us amateur production and distribution, but left intact professional control of fame. It used to be hard to record music, but no longer. It used to be hard to reproduce and distribute music, but no longer. It is still hard to find and publicize good new music. We have created a number of tools that make filtering and publicizing both easy and effective in other domains. The application of those tools to new music could change the musical landscape.

Basically, Clay shows how there are weblogs of all kinds, some get many readers, many get few, and the conference promoters and publishers looking for saleable content can tell in a flash which is which because, frankly, the cream rises to the top. Instead of the 'professional' buyer or reviewer ratings of a Billboard or NOW rag, Kazaa-style P2P distribution gives the promoters and the consumers alike untainted empirical data readings of what people actually seek, what they keep and what they trade back. Britney Spears will still sell millions, and Robbie Williams still does, but so also might David Kilpatrick and thousands of other very decent music-smiths around the world who don't make the Sony/EMI casting couches.

If you still think the RIAA are rational people, if you still think your songs are best left in the hands of some A&R exec, then do yourself a favour and read this, and dare yourself to dream outside the box.