Well, once the Big Solar Flare hits us, that's the end of electronic media anyway, and whatever music survives will be back to copyright-free vernacular oral tradition in the feral context of small ultra-violent communities desperately trying to survive in the post-technological era. Half-remembered snatches of pop hits and advert jingles will be embelished into epic ballads of hero tale & adventure by true bards whose wordcraft & cunning will be the only thing between them and the sword.

Of course, most of us won't make it, but there'll be a few that will - the young, the strong, the fit, the especially ambitious - and music will resume its true place at the heart of the community rather than just an indulgent aside of a consumerist culture so far removed from any sense of reality that it's impossible to say what's real anymore. Out of this very natural apocalypse and second Very Dark Age Indeed, there will emerge a New Age on Earth, one in which humanity has learned the mistakes of the past least they're doomed to repeat them. This will be an age of love, beauty, harmony with nature - and that means, come the year 3012 it will be ANALOGUE all the way and DIGITAL will be seen as the overly convenient crap-bettaging-crap that it always was.

Well, that's my cheery thought for the day, chaps! Ultimately optimistic though, what?