Music is an important part of our lives. It has a unique ability to move and stimulate us.

We are very lucky to live in a time where music is so available. In previous times the average person may only have heard one band in their entire lives, but thanks to radio, records, CDs, MP3s and easier transportation both Live and recorded music have never been so accessible or pervasive. Music is everywhere.

It is said that the rise of the "Manufactured" pop band heralds the end of music as we know it. The fact that US interest in new British music has fallen to unprecedented levels is said to be symptomatic of a fundamental illness in the UK recording industry.
This is shortsighted nonsense.
Music trends are cyclical: there is no more (and no less) rubbish around than there has ever been.
In the so-called "Golden Age of Music" around 1972 so currently in retro-vogue, conveniently forgotten is that at the same time Andy Williams and Engelbert Humperdink featured high in the charts. The fact is that, in the words of Paul Simon, "every generation throws a hero up the pop charts". Whether that hero is remembered in 30 years, like T Rex, or forgotten, like Paper Lace, is the measure of their true worth.
Gareth Gates could go the way of Jimmy "Long haired lover from Liverpool" Osmond (still touring, by the way!), but within today's throwaway pop stars are the Eric Claptons, Stings, George Michaels and Robbie Williams of 10 years' time. Who of us who lived through the 80's ("there was a time... before cell-phones, before the Internet... a more innocent time", embodied by films like The Wedding Singer) would have thought George Michael could ever produce Adult music?

The current distraction with manufactured bands is nonsense: all singers, all bands, should be judged upon their musical output alone. Frankie Goes to Hollywood, ABC, T Rex, and many others, even The Monkees were all manufactured bands, but all produced some surprisingly good music. Even Prince, who's image (5'0" of scraggly-bearded Mike Myers-like sexual inadequacy) had one or two good tunes in there (Sign of the Times, Thieves in the Temple). Our job, as listeners, is not to discard, but to winnow. There is Good Music out there, but you have to listen to a lot of rubbish to get to it. With 30 years of experience, I can say It Was Always Thus.

No, the real issue facing the music industry is the Digital Genie.
Home taping has been a part of the recording industry since before Phillips introduced the Compact Cassette in the mid-1960s. For years the American RIAA ran an advertising campaign: "Home taping is Killing music" with a skull and crossbones logo. It was so obviously untrue - home taping simply doubled the exposure an artist would get - the RIAA dropped it in embarrassment. Analogue copies on to tape always suffered from Generational Loss: the effects were self-limiting.
But when the CD format was released the Digital Genie was let out of the bottle. No one realised it at the time, but after 15 years of CD-driven unprecedented (and unjustifiable) profit levels within the music industry (little of which found it's way back to the artists) the first commercial CD writers finally became available. With digital copying not suffering from Generational Loss (a CD could be copied, the copy copied again, and so on, with no loss in quality) the effects of home copying became greater.
Overall growth in the music industry offset the increased levels of piracy until the advent of broadband Internet connections, the MP3 compressed music format and P2P file-sharing applications like Napster and Kazaa finally triggered the runaway piracy the music industry had been fuelling for so long by maintaining simply huge CD profit margins. In 2001, for the first time in 20 years, CD sales dropped. The rot had set in... This article describes the problem perfectly....

How the music industry responds to the new dynamic is a very important question. The film industry firmly believed videos would kill the cinema: in fact it reinforced it.
The new technologies can take the music industry upwards but they have to let go of the traditional profit models and start thinking Outside the Box.
Consumers are increasingly aware that paying £16 for a CD to listen to two tracks they like is no longer necessary. The current level of pricing (and profitability) is unsupportable in the long term, and that becomes clearer with every passing year.
It'll be a rough ride down, and the record industry will fight it every step of the way, but there will be a retrenchment back to an earlier, lower, sustainable level of profitability, driven by new technology.
Those record companies that don't see it coming and grab the new technologies will die.

What the record companies don't seem to understand is the viral marketing necessary to spread knowledge of bands. There are only so many bands radio can accommodate and many hundreds waiting behind them for a break.
At £16 a CD people can't afford to experiment with new music, and perform the necessary viral marketing. So they will only buy the artists they know, which reinforces record company reluctance to experiment with new bands. This is very unhealthy.
A closer look at Napster and Kazaa would, I suggest, discover that they are in fact performing much of the viral marketing not being done elsewhere, especially in America where broadband Internet connections are the most prevalent.

One of the way the music business can benefit from new technology is to change the way bands are marketed. Marketing by radio needs to change: we have the ludicrous situation of 95% of radio stations, local and national, playing the same 40 or 50 records all the time in different orders.
Digital radio, giving us (hopefully) many hundreds more stations, needs to point the way to narrowcast stations specialising in different musical tastes. Currently we have far too many commercial pop stations, R1 for cutting edge teenage music, R3 and Classic FM for classical, Jazz FM for jazz, Radio 4 for news and plays, R5 Live for sports, and... well, that's about it, really.
What we need is an opera station, a C&W station, a talking books station, a 1960s station (outside London), a station that plays good, all-new (no charts) MoR rock music (not just the same 40 songs but 100s of new ones all the time), a Musicals station, a punk station, an African music station, a Turkish music station, a Russian music station, a "Jihad Radio" Middle Eastern music station, an Australian music station, an all-South African station and so on. A bit like satellite TV. The only example thus far that has emerged is Planet Rock, which is surprisingly good (how many radio stations would play "The Voice" by Alan Parsons and the live version of "Wanted dead or alive" by Bon Jovi?), and of course their station promos are hilarious, for example: "we're just like Desert Island Discs...... but without that old bird.......". Recommended.
They already do satellite radio in the US - they call it XFM. This is a great idea but badly needs some anarchy - at the moment it's anodyne MoR rubbish driven down to the lowest common denominator by the music companies to appeal to as many as possible. It will fail unless it starts to narrowcast.

Another way to move forward is to solve the "this album is not currently available" problem. Try buying Wayfaring Sons by Colin Hay, Do animals believe in God by Pink Military, or Zero she flies by Al Stewart, and you will be told there is "insufficient demand"
Rubbish.
There is plenty of demand, there just isn't much money in it. The Internet allows "the long tail" to become profitable, and as digital donwloads become more widely available, more competitive and cheaper, this should begin to arrive.
A lower cost solution would be to put all of these "we can't be bothered to market" albums on to the Internet and give us free access to them. The PR effect would be huge. People would be able to experiment with artists they had never listened to before and, like Napster or Kazaa, create CD sales, rather than replace them. But maybe that's too obvious.

We all want to know: hence the popularity of Desert Island Discs and My Top 12 (with "Whispering" Bob Harris). We're fascinated by other people's favourite tracks, and we all have a rough guide of what makes up our own. Always assuming we had sufficient warning prior to our being stranded on the hypothetical Desert Island, we could all assemble our Favourite Tracks Of All Time.

So what makes a good track into an Essential track?

There is a lot of lazy music (most covers, most pop music)
There is puffed-up music (classical, opera) that uses musical forms current several centuries ago and claims somehow to be better than the more developed musical forms of the last century (syncopation, beat, electronic instruments, recording techniques). It’s like saying a 1910’s automobile is better for everyday driving than a BMW 530i. Maybe nice for the occasional outing, but not for everyday use…..
There is a lot of reasonable music (most stuff since the sixties, except of course Country & Western and anything by Norrie Paramour...)
Then there is that small, select body of music that we treasure. Each of us have it, the majority covers our childhood, teens and twenty-somethings. Additions become fewer as we move in to our thirties and forties.

A Favourite Track Of All Time needs to have at least one of the following:
- It tells a story (“Hotel California” by The Eagles, “Wooden Horse” by Suzanne Vega)
- It covers a subject close to our hearts (“Flesh for Fantasy” by Billy Idol)
- It has a killer riff (like “The edge of Seventeen” by Stevie Nicks, recently appearing in the film School of Rock)
- It reminds us of a pivotal point in our lives (“Ritz” by Steve Harley)

Combinations of the above increase the likelihood of it getting added to our imaginary treasure trove.