With all due respect to Bruce Houghton at Hypebot and Andrew Dubber at New Music Strategies, the dream is over. It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee.

Bruce’s post “Why Are We Still Debating Free?” infuriated me. Sure, Chris Anderson’s notion of “freemium” sounds great for any website looking to get users to come back often to consume content, but look at the body count piling up in Music 2.0 and tell me how that looks. It’s not truly “freemium” because they don’t own the good in question to begin with. Andrew Dubber incorrectly states that “Yes, Google gives their consumer-facing stuff away, and they are a massively successful company.” Google owns search on the web. They’re not giving that away. They have a near monopoly on the most potent revenue stream on the web!

Those of us who work very hard on the editorial side, especially on the web, know just how difficult it is to get people excited about music these days. There are times you can’t give the stuff away! For all the talk about bands as brands and what-not, I can say honestly that music may have never been a smaller part of the overall entertainment picture than it is today. Sure, music may be ubiquitous in commercials, on our iPods, and wherever else it lives, but that doesn’t mean people are actively seeking it out in any meaningful way.

The music business has changed and so have music consumers. Now that music can be had for next to nothing, consumers are willing to accept whatever low-quality product is available online and see no incentive to upgrade. The same is true in any other business that’s been affected by the Internet. It pains me to say it, but there may be no future whatsoever for music as a business in its own right. The only thing these businesses can really sell are t-shirts! How can a strategy around “freemium” work when consumers are already acquiring the good for free or nearly free?

Part of my music crusade has been to say how impactful events like this are for the music industry. There’s a great comment in the Idolator post on Blender’s closing from the friend of an anonymous flack who doesn’t know which outlets will be left to pitch by year’s end. It’s that bad. That outlook, coupled with the industry’s retreat from promotion in the name of revenue, viz. videos holed up on Youtube with no embedding privileges and the like, music will soon be harder to find than bin Laden!

Heck, even the thing people seem to enjoy most about music online is changing. Last.fm announced this week that they’ll be changing their streaming policies in many parts of the world, setting off a tidal wave of outrage. Powerful music search engine Seeqpod will begin charging developers for its data, too. Ominous noises are coming out of the Imeem camp, too, no matter what they’re telling Michael Arrington at Techcrunch.

Those of us who foresaw the end of Music 2.0 can only shake our heads. Chris Anderson’s “freemium” dream is over. The blue sky mines are collapsing around our ears.

What’s ahead? No one knows. I’m talking to my friend Jason Herskowitz almost daily about the future of music on the web, especially around music discovery. He’s been working on some cool stuff lately, most recently Playdar, an idea I urge you to check out. Nevertheless, he fears that Darknet will soon replace anything remotely legitimate for content sharing online. It’s a frightening proposition for rights holders who have any interest in protecting their properties in this brave new world, and equally scary for those of us who care about music as part of our cultural fabric.

What a difference a year makes.

Well, not quite a year. More like four days, if that. What I learned, along with just about everyone trying to cover SXSW, was that it’s nearly impossible to shoot video and turn it around fast enough to matter. Then you begin to realize how much work goes into creating something you can share with your peers without embarrassing yourself too much, and the reality hits you: it’s just not worth it.

It’s sad. I wanted to attend this year’s festival just to see how far off it was from last year. I wanted to tell the story that it simply didn’t live up to expectations, that the industry’s last best hope was finally running out of gas, and that fans would need to look elsewhere to discover new and interesting artists. No one else did.

After considerable headscratching, I wrote my own synopsis based on what I’d read on blogs and music websites and then comparing that coverage to that of previous years. In my view, the major labels have taken the reins in the hopes of wrenching every last penny out of the only people on earth who are dedicated enough to attend a four-day-long music festival. I don’t think it’s a culture war between the cool and the uncool, but rather an indication that the majors will co-opt their farm team, even if it means mortgaging the future.

Why should any band participate in SXSW when the bulk of the coverage will be dedicated to artists who are already household names? And remember when bloggers were believed to stand outside of the hype as bastions of good taste? Those days are over, if they ever existed.

My friend Mark pointed this out to me and I just laughed. He quoted my friend and colleague Jessica Suarez, someone who knows what bands are breaking now, but wants to understand why tastemakers from the countless outlets that attend SXSW don’t concentrate on digging for gold during their time in Austin.

It’s a common lament worth repeating. We’re exhausting our cultural resources faster than new ones can develop, and that’s a problem. The AP’s Jake Coyle caught up with Grizzly Bear’s Ed Droste:

“It can be really detrimental to explode too quickly,” said Droste. “For me, personally, the music that I like the most is the stuff that takes a little time to grow with and has a bit of longevity. There are albums that I’ve jumped on and been like `Yeah!’ and then three months later, I’ve been like, `Nah.’ It’s sort of the nature of the beast.”

As I’ve written in the past, it’s high time music critics stepped up and disrupted the hype cycle. I know it sounds corny, but if you want to prove how important editorial is to the music industry, it’s at events like these. You might say that you’re doing your part by highlighting lesser known bands like Wavves or the Dirty Projectors, but you’re missing the point.

When every so-called cultural critic is coming to the same conclusions, it gives rise to notions of the music critic cabal that we’ve been fighting all these years. Does it mean taking unpopular stances on popular albums sometimes? Absolutely, but what do you really have to lose? If nothing else, you come away with a unique viewpoint, which has the ring of cultural currency to me, to say nothing of retaining the last vestiges of your dignity.

If we as critics concentrate solely on solving the music industry’s problems, we won’t be able to adequately address our own. Jason Gross and I have been going back and forth quite a bit about this on Twitter. He wrote, “Music biz = our bread/butter (& our love). As for saving criticism, do you mean the whole scribe trade or our just our own turf?” Conflating the music business with music itself is silly. (I’m sure Jason agrees, but his tweet is illustrative nonetheless.)

If criticism survives it will be as a cultural filter. It sounds impersonal, but it’s of crucial importance to an audience. We have to stop thinking of ourselves as servants of the music industry and concentrate on being of value to an audience with precious little time to spend thinking about our passion. Remember, critics have always been cultural curators, so it’s not a radical change in job description. We just have to think of our role in broader terms.

Our love is writing about music. Let’s not forget that.

What lies ahead will be painful, without question, but that doesn’t mean that no good will come of the demise of the record industry. You know all those CDs that are largely being ignored on store shelves these days, while kids snap up Fallout 3? It’s costly waste. Think about the piles of plastic junk that will be lounging for lifetimes in landfills all around the country for a moment and then tell me it won’t be a net positive when CD manufacturing stops.

Most industries force consumers to adjust when a newer, cheaper method of delivering product is discovered. The music industry hasn’t. Instead of seeing an opportunity to shift consumption to a purely digital market once the iPod was released, the music industry continued to produce CDs, even though they are increasingly being ripped to hard drives and discarded anyway.

I saw how long and difficult it was to get consumers to move to DVD while I worked as a video store clerk. It’s tough transition, to be sure, but it did happen. The video industry weaned consumers off of VHS. The music industry has done the same frequently throughout its short history, moving consumers from one format to another, usually to protect its profit margin. Why doesn’t that still hold? They too are living in the past.

Is the music industry’s demise encoded in the CDs DNA? Chris Ott alluded to it in his 2005 Stylus feature, “This Click’s for You.” He might have called it “Death by 44.1kHz.” The changes fomented by the digital revolution were simply too great for the music industry to counter. They underestimated their consumers and now they’re paying a high price for it.

You’ll have to forgive me for seeing karmic retribution in what’s happening in the music business today, but it’s hard not too. Whether they’re ripping off artists or consumers, we’re talking about an industry that commodified art at a handsome profit for generations, only to beg for forgiveness on their deathbed.

Unfortunately for the music industry, the engine of innovation isn’t a spigot that can be turned off. The democratization of technology is a net good for society. More people are toying with ideas that make our lives more convenient through the sheer ease of digital files. It’s a phenomenon affecting many industries today. It will probably kill the newspaper as we know it. It just hit the music industry first.

Tennent’s plea asks us all to put our heads in the sand. No amount of cultural amnesia can fix this problem. Men in black can’t wipe our memories back to a time before Napster’s existence. But I know it’s not that simple-minded. This sentiment is common among critics, most of whom have no stake in the music business selling music. It’s a noble, but ultimately pointless exercise. I think our time as critics is better spent sifting through the ruins of the music industry to uncover the treasures they leave behind.