So this is where the copyfight has led us – the commoditisation of music!

Do we really think the quality of music created at this rate will reach the standards seen in the past? Think of your favourite albums – the White Album, say, or What’s Goin’ On, or whatever it is – and ask whether it could have been made under these conditions?

Seriously, I think you’re reaping what you’ve sown here. Copyfighters have undermined the system which allowed creative musicians a great deal of drug-taking and idleness but which also resulted in great music.

Did they think of the consequences before engaging on their crusade? I don’t think they did, much. They issued vague proclamations stating that in view of changing circumstances, the music industry would have to adapt. Musicians would have to do more live work. The coked-up A&R executives were about to lose their jobs, and thank goodness.

But before you hit reply and say “of COURSE great albums will continue to be made, you idiot! Stop being so elitist and just accept that things are changing”, think of the wider picture.

It takes time to make great art. Conrad wrote sixteen novels but it took him twenty years. It took five years for Junot Diaz to grind out his Pulitzer prize-winning novel ‘Oscar Wao’.

And now we have a band cranking out an album a month, like factory workers producing their quotas of plastic bottles and baby’s bibs.

Well, to paraphrase Mencken “copyfighting is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard”.