Is it A&R? I bet Orson would not have been picked up from here today. When we spotted No Tomorrow 5 years ago, the buzz spread from here to the Record of the Day site and was rapidly picked up by several publishers and eventually Universal. Mind you, the useless executives lost the band commercially within seconds of the track reaching No1. Though they charted the album too on the strength of No Tomorrow (subtitled No To Follow).

But Promotion people are ghastly too; the major label dominance of the airwaves is greater than ever.

Lazy programmers don't even bother with the (hyped) charts; they just programme by label.

Sales? Retail is dead (shops); apart from iTunes (downloads).

Live? Only a very few appear to be bothering (Take That) - are there any small venues with imagination in booking?

Publishing? For a while they were the only people building, nurturing, training, developing. Are they still fulfilling this function?

Managers? We've covered them before.

Agents? PR?

You tell me. Strikes me they are all equally appalling.

Magazines? Yuk. Videos? Yuk. TV Shows? Yuk.

The writing was on the wall in the 1990s.

Nowadays I think that small is best. People being creative on their own and missing out the "Industry" types.

The "Colleges" have created clones which have made the Music Industry into Suits with no vision ( now doing it by the book !! ) There is only ONE book on Music which actually advocates creativeness and trying different things - and that is "How to make it in music" - all the other act like they want to be the bible. This is more true of books for those wanting to work in music who are not musical.

It is like coaching in sport - which irons out all the flair in players. When the African teams burst on the scene in the 1990s they were fresh and exciting. Their players unsullied by boring coaches......now 20 years later they are just as boring as European teams. The flair gone......

This is what happens in life when you take a creative industry and apply capitalist values to it.

The whole function of A&R has totally changed in the last ten years. Its now R. Repertoire for signed acts in milking every last drop of revenue in every media direction possible for an act. Kylie's jaunt in the States last week for instance, which I think is a mindless tax write off. Are they throwing darts at a dart board at Wrights Lane? (talked to darling K last Wednesday at the Chateau Marmont BTW, such a love).

Not that long ago particularly in London where everyone at every label knew each other and what the buzz was, I would see A&R people stop by the big studios, see what was going on, there were no secrets, there was a lot of interaction. Numbers wise now there simply isn't the amount of people employed at labels so this no longer happens. I think that was a very healthy thing. A lot of studios have closed as well and places like #1 Piccadilly being vacant, which is a sad thing. All of these things contributed to a synergy that is no longer here. Not good.

So I would say the new bastardized version of A&R at labels is the most useless to the future. Not necessarily publishing A&R/creative.

Managers that know what they are doing truly earn their 15-20%, they get all the blame if it goes wrong and none of the glory when it goes right. I'm not talking about Irving Azoff here. Irving kind of gets my ass.

I've never seen anything in any book that comes close to my experiences in the music industry, and I know a lot of people feel the same way. You can't learn this in a book or in a classroom.