Whether this takes the form of a BBC-style licence fee, some form of access fee worked out with Internet Service Providers, or paid-for file-hosting sites like RapidShare remains to be seen. But one thing seems clear: it’s a future in which the traditional record business doesn’t appear to have much involvement, other than as an outdated, institutionalised barrier trying to sustain its own superfluous position by blocking progress towards a modern system. Small wonder that the likes of Radiohead, whose In Rainbows album was successfully made available through their own online company, have been advising up-and-coming artists to avoid signing with record labels at all.

In the light of all this, awards beanfeasts like the Brits and Mercury Awards seem like invites to the Captain’s Table on the Titanic, full of champagne-quaffing industry aristocrats seemingly heedless of the decline of their own business. Worse still, locked down below decks are those honest toilers whose fates have been inextricably entwined with the mismanaged music industry - not just the ailing support-system of magazines, in which advertising revenues and contributors’ rates have been tumbling inexorably, or the steady stream of redundancies at PR companies serving the music business, but also the whole retail network of small independent record shops staffed by dedicated, knowledgeable enthusiasts, through which the industry once engaged with its customer base.

For years, the major labels have scandalously chipped away at this network, offering preferential deals to supermarket chains that allowed them to sell the Top 40 albums at a price for which independent retailers could not even buy them in as stock. Some chains were tacitly allowed to import cheaper stock from abroad via the Channel Islands, thus evading the punitive tax burden that independent retailers could not avoid. Meanwhile, the labels appeared to imagine that the relationship between distributor and retailer would remain the same for ever. One sales rep, astonished when an independent retailer ordered only two copies of its latest big release, had not realised that the cost price offered to the shop was more than the retail price the local Asda would be offering to its customers for the same product.

Yet at the same time, the industry was becoming increasingly reliant upon these same hard-pressed independent shops as outlets for the back catalogue items that the supermarkets would not dream of stocking. And not just back catalogue, and not just supermarkets, either - last year, the staff of my local HMV regarded me with the sort of smirking incredulity reserved for idiots and wind-up merchants when I enquired about the Bob Dylan Christmas album that had been released the day before. I was having a joke, right? No, I wasn’t, but when they checked and realised the album in question did actually exist, I was dismissed with the cursory comment that it wasn’t the kind of album they would stock anyway. Quite how they knew this, when they didn’t even know it existed, remained a matter of conjecture, as I sought out an alternative outlet for the latest release by an artist whose previous album had topped both the British and American charts. Yes, the future of music retailing was safe in HMV’s capable hands!

Now, thanks in large part to the prejudicial ignorance of the record companies, the retail sector is all but finished, other than for a few small specialist shops, while the old record labels are slowly creaking their way towards insignificance. After all, if EMI couldn’t even secure Lily Allen a nomination for last year’s Mercury Prize, a place on the worst shortlist in living memory, what good are they to her? At the other extreme, Speech Debelle split from her small independent label Big Dada, claiming the label lacked the weight to market her winning album Speech Therapy properly, when it bucked the usual trend and scored the worst post-Mercury sales of any winner.

That, however, would hardly explain the album’s poor online sales performance: indeed, the easy availability of demonstration samples on the internet may actually have contributed to the lack of enthusiasm for Speech Therapy, an album whose unremittingly grim tone of hurtful reproach I found enervating rather than uplifting - especially when compared to Kasabian’s multi-anthemic West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum, the obvious front-runner from last year, which has since gone on to become part of the cultural landscape, and even helped secure the Spanish football team, by their own admission, success at the World Cup.