Independent Music Isn't Dead. It's the Only Thing Left.

If you haven't been reading the trades for the last couple of years, you might be saddened to know that the music industry--at least, the music industry as it has been molded over the last 40 years--is crumbling.

The cause of death is a pretty simple one: You and I and everyone we know have been stealing records for almost ten years now, remorselessly and relentlessly. As much as we all hate to listen to Lars Ulrich cry into Bob Rock's silk ascot, it's true. It's illegal, and we've been doing it because we assume that we are justified because our jobs aren't as much fun as emptying Hetfield's dishwasher and flipping mansions for profit. We rationalize our theft by telling ourselves that it's ludicrous that someone should make millions (MILLIONS!) for creating art while we have to roll up our sleeves and wake up for our jobs every day.

We're not exactly right about that, though. The reason Lars, Jack Johnson, John Mayer, Kelly Clarkson and all of those goobers are justified in making millions off their art is the same reason why LeBron James is worth millions for playing a game: If they weren't making millions off of it, their promoters would be making many more millions off of it while the artists lived on Ramen. In short, if Dave Grohl writes a song that a million people want to hear, that fact by itself doesn't justify a million dollar paycheck. But SOMEONE is going to make a million dollars selling that record. It might as well be Dave. If LeBron James averages 74 points a game for a whole season, that's going to lead directly to someone selling a billion hideous Cavs jerseys. Shouldn't LeBron get a piece of that? Shouldn't LeBron get a BIG piece of that?

But obviously, everyone's not satisfied with that explanation. If we were, we wouldn't be burning the hell out of everything we even sort of liked and filesharing all day. The result is that millions and millions of dollars are failing to make their way into the music industry.

It's only bad news for a few people. Your favorite millionaire activists will still be able to sell records. Kanye and Tom Morello and Gwen S. aren't going anywhere. As long as there's an Us Weekly, they will still sell records and fill the Staples Center, and that's pretty good news for communists and fourth-graders everywhere. Fountains of Wayne are going to have to start sleeping at Days Inn, but they'll still be OK. Their bosses, though, the ones who had a different diamond-encrusted grill for each Wu-Tang album release, who insisted on feting Frances Bean's eighth grade graduation on a hovercraft in the Aegean (I'm making this up; I wasn't invited), who had millions and millions of dollars at their disposal for promotion and production and street teams and advertising and risk-taking, THOSE guys are dying off like the dodo.

What that's going to do is polarize music in a pretty serious way. On one side, there will be a tiny nucleus of megabosses at the labels. Their stables -once full of hundreds of acts that had good songs but no following or who had been working their way up for years- will be cut down to only the very biggest sellers. That part of the industry will always be there.