In many ways, Beyond 2.0: The Future of Music is a welcome addition to an ever-increasing field on the impact of the Internet on popular music. This veritable explosion of studies is in marked contrast to the paucity of dedicated studies pre-Napster which, for most practical purposes, represents the tipping-point for the ‘old’ conception of ‘The Music Industry’ dominated, as this was, by the then five major record companies. I place ‘The Music Industry’ in capitals and quote marks for a combination of reasons but mainly because, still only gradually and not altogether seamlessly, theorists of popular music have grown used to the idea that the recording industry should not be made to stand for a wider entity that, as far as I am aware, has never been successfully defined.

The central problem with conceptions of ‘The Music Industry’ is that it attributes considerable, but deeply opaque, power to a collection of music companies of different types. The work of Collins and Young promises to repudiate this bad habit and to expose its limitations through an examination of the now, much-changed, ‘musical ecosystem’ (p. 77) to quote the work. Somehow, though, the authors never quite arrive at their destination. Before speculating on why this might be the case, it is worth observing that, as someone who leads a programme in music industry studies, I would not hesitate in recommending this title to my students: Beyond 2.0: The Future of Music covers important ground in accessible ways; the exposition is always lucid and well-supported with references to appropriate literature. There is much to learn from an engagement with the work.

‘Lucidity’ is a useful point of departure for a discussion of this particular work. Given that this a co-authored piece, there appears to be no problem associated with ‘voice’ in regard to the text; as an academic work, this is greatly to be welcomed, but perhaps there is something a little seductive and a little misleading about its evident fluency. The work is a comparatively brief one, excepting the introduction it is roughly 50,000 words in length. Divided into eight chapters, this gives a chapter length of something in excess of 6000 words. What is evident is the economy of the writers’ joint style when it comes to aspects of popular music history (e.g. the rise of recording and its arguable industrial consequences; the centrality and constraints of copyright legislation). This is to be admired but, and this will read more harshly than it is written, as the work progresses, what begins as ‘economic’ is transformed into a tone that seems somehow ‘conversational’. The relevance of this observation to a review of the text is that when perhaps, and only perhaps, as two authors came to make their sense of the considerable upheavals in economy, industry and business models, what emerges is their agreement with a particular ‘line of march’ more than perhaps an exposition of a problematic they began with.

To quote Maniglier (Reference Maniglier2012, p. 21), a problematic can be understood as ‘the matrix or the angle from which it will become possible and even necessary to formulate a certain number of precise problems’. The matrix established by Collins and Young is that the electronic media of the turn of the 20th century eliminated the need for performers and audiences to be in the same room at the same time. Demand for music products that defied the limitations of shared space and time gave rise to an industrial practice under which recording companies came to enjoy (implicitly) excessive power and control over what musicians became market successes. This is persuasive, but the authors then tend to agree between them that what counts most in regard to the rupturing of the certainties of control over recording and distribution is that ‘the possibilities for musicians have been expanded dramatically’ (p. 133). In this way, the problematic tends to be abandoned when what was required was a thorough engagement with each of the constituencies that make up popular music as an industrial process.

By this I mean that there needed to be far closer exploration of the changes that have taken place within and between music companies, musicians, music users and music itself. The over-arching point is that popular music still has the recording at its centre. The great, big change is that the market value of the recording has collapsed. This means that profit must be sought in other ways, or in other combinations of ways. In all of this, it may well be the case that more musicians than previously are earning some kind of living (although I see precious little evidence of this among our popular music performance graduates, year-on-year), but the fact remains that markets need to be entered and musicians are not best equipped for the exigencies this demands. By treating Amazon as if it was an ‘intermediary’ in the same way that Tom Parker was for Elvis Presley (p. 63), the authors make a cardinal misstep. In reality, old-style music intermediaries are still ‘out there’ and they continue to impose the values and the standards of the ‘old’ music industry – they are paid for their services and take their profits up-front and ahead of the musicians they work with.

By treating the hegemony of the recording industry as a kind of historic ‘blip’ in performer–audience relations, what Collins and Young fail to see is that what defined that hegemony – a business model that saw super-profits made by a fractional percentage of all the available talent – produced as a massive by-product a seething mass of unfulfilled musicians. Even as the conditions of its monopoly have substantially evaporated, the protocols of the old regime persist. An unguessable proportion of the ‘seething mass’ can now, if they are astute and tech-savvy, find audiences. This, however, is not ‘liberation’ in any meaningful sense, rather, services such as Bandcamp have found a way to profit from the unprofitable. Musicians who would not ordinarily have got ‘deals’ now bear all of the expense and all of the risks of pursuing what the authors refer to as ‘an “agreeable” (sic) living’ (p. 129).

If this conclusion seems excessively harsh and pessimistic, a glance at any of the now multiple charts published by Music Week (the UK's trade publication for the music industry) shows all of the ‘big’ acts still signed to major record companies. We have no way of knowing what their ‘deals’ are or what proportion of their income accrues from other revenue streams (live performance, merchandising, brand associations, ‘synchs’ and so on), but what is apparent is that, even if some of them arrived at the doors of the majors by inventive, digitally self-managed routes, they still need old-style alliances and those alliances will be conducted on the basis that what is good for business trumps what is good for music (or musicians, come to that). ‘Technology’ has changed the game, but the game is still played by rules that that lie beyond the borders of the act of music-making. Beyond 2.0 The Future of Music helps in some ways to locate the borders between music and business but there remains much work to be done on border control before the optimism that fuels this text can be justified.