Genealogy of music was always a dubious thing. And it always seems related to the desire to define musicians as important because they were “pioneers”. This also relates back to the growing emphasis upon authorship in music (rather than performance) throughout last few centuries (cf, of course, early american folk as the last flowering of an alternate tradition). Authorship, of course, is vital to the emergence of a music “industry” – first via creation and selling of scores and subsequently records. In short, the genealogy in music is intimately involved with the creation and maintenance of music industry.

This of course relates to more general observations that perhaps history isn’t a linear, upward progress…

So i wd suggest that this situation is only one where the music industry “has nowhere to go” – as the intellectual foundations of their biz model are undermined by changes not in format but in platform.

To flip Eco, is it not the case that memory (felt and remembered experience and sensation) remains but genealogy (the established, canonical sense of who is important by recourse to linear narratives of progression?) is lost?

Going back to Drummond’s book – after one of their first sessions with a school, Bill Drummond’s buddy takes him up on his ideas:

“There is no way they will be able to relate to all your theories about recorded music being over and done with. For them it is only beginning. For them, music, especially recorded music, is opening up a whole new world, a world away from what they might concieve to eb the narrow confines of their life here. Just like Strawberry Fields did for you. As far as they are concerned, who are you to be telling them that all music that is being recorded now and that they might like is pointless, finished and probably rubbish?”

In other words – is he just another grumpy old man complaining that his generation was better? And just as “genealogy of music” serves to underpin a flagging industry, Drummond’s own insistence about “the end of music” is a (perhaps unknowing) tactic to ignore the changing substructure of “music” (remix culture etc) as a cultural phenomena, and to keep those values and traditions which he values most at the top of the pile.