There have been a few interesting stories related to music and copyright over the last couple of weeks, and they have a definite bearing on the future of book publishing.

As I mentioned earlier, the British government is apparently finally coming to its senses about the ridiculous laws banning copying of music that you have bought. Note that this is not a new problem. Back when I was in school we were being warned that taping albums we had bought was illegal.

Secondly we had the welcome news that Sony has finally bowed to the inevitable and agreed to join the other major record companies in selling its music through the very wonderful Amazon Download Store. (And you know what this means, don’t you: Bruuuuuuuce!!!)

The latest piece of the puzzle is the news that In Rainbows, the Radiohead album that was released online last year, has been selling very well indeed now that it is available on CD. You may recall that Radiohead asked fans to make a contribution when downloading the album, but were happy to allow people to take it for free if they wanted. And despite the fact that it is widely believed that around 60% of the people who downloaded the album paid nothing for it, 40% did hand over money when they didn’t have to, and around 122,000 paid money for it last week when it went on sale in stores and through iTunes. So clearly Radiohead have not totally shot themselves in the foot by offering the album for free.

This has bearing on the book industry because music is well ahead of books in the rush to digitization. People seem much happier to listen to music online than to read books online, even though music aficionados maintain that what you get in an MP3 is generally much poorer quality than what you get when you buy a CD. (And doubtless they are right, but some of us remember getting most of our music from transistor radios.)

There is a long and interesting article on the subject on the Fingertips web site (a well-known MP3 source). This not only takes on some of the nonsense written about the Radiohead project, but also speculates on what all this means for the future. It makes many of the points that people like Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross make about releasing your novel as a free ebook. I was also particularly impressed by this:

The digital age isn’t just about online music distribution; it’s about low barrier to entry. This changes the market just as much, if not more, than the existence of MP3s.

The 21st century has brought with it an unprecedented ability for a musician to record and distribute his or her music to the great wide world. There are way way (way) more people doing this than there were 15 or 20 years ago.

And you know, the same is true of books (and journalism). There are way more people writing novels now than there ever were before. (Writing a novel also appears to be an ambition of vast numbers of people who have yet to write one.) The characteristics of the brave new world of emusic and ebooks is that the barriers to entry have dropped through the floor while the amount of money people are prepared to pay for the content has followed the same trajectory. With more powerful computers and software, movies may soon follow that path.

There’s more too. One thing that the Fingertips article didn’t mention is globalization. The onward march of Western cultural imperialism is opening up markets such as India, China and Russia, not to mention Mexico and Brazil and Indonesia, and the Internet makes distribution to these markets a snap. And guess what? The people who actually succeed in making money in these markets won’t be the vast mass of people who are not making money now. They will be the Radioheads and JK Rowlings of the entertainment world (at least initially until their equivalents from India and China take over). Everyone else will still be stuck out in the long tail looking for a market.

There is an argument that with, billions of potential consumers, anyone in the long tail will find enough people to make a living from, even at ruinously low per-unit revenue. I’ve yet to see any evidence that this will happen. I also think that, even if it does, this is all going to exacerbate the trends towards income inequality in the West that people are getting so upset about these days.

As to where this will lead us, I really don’t know. If I had a solution I’d be rich. As with so much human activity, we’ll muddle through somehow. I doubt that it will mean The End of the World. But for some people it might the end of the world as we know it.