And it’s most likely that any changes that do occur will be one’s you’ll like, otherwise they won’t last very long. Fine’s general view on digital music and the Internet is that successful products and delivery systems are “simple easy and elegant.” This, he said, explains the success of the “aesthetically pleasing” iPod and iTunes, with its “simple interface.”

Discussing the topic of online down, Fine considers Radiohead’s pay-what-you-like download experiment with their album In Raibows “Enormously successful.” It’s not, however an ideal test case for future attempts, as he thinks Radiohead is a band with rabid fan base that’s generally technically adept and young.” Fine doesn’t think that we’re likely to see many bands doing the same thing. “Even if you’re a big band you still want a tangible output.,” Fine said, noting that the fact that the hype around the In Rainbows download story draws attention awy from the fact that millions of CDs of the album were also produced.

Nevertheless, there is an economic advantage to the online album distribution, at least following the Radiohead model. Direct distribution “cuts out the middleman,” giving the artists themselves a much larger share of the profits.

The phenomenon of eliminating the middleman is another recent trend in the music industry. Fine cited Madonna’s deal to put out an album with Live Nation as an example of this. Even here though, he argued it was important not to overestimate the effect of digital music on this phenomenon, adding that “came out of indie rock distribution” in the 1980s.

In fact, in Fine’s view, many of the stories involving Internet music are merely part of older trends. He finds accessibility to new or obscure artists online “so much better than 20 years ago [when] we were taping college radio; it was the only place to hear it. [The Internet] is a new way to surface and find stuff, but it’s part of a long running story; it’s not game-changing.”