We’re apparently on the verge of a recession. Tell that to the leading players in the music industry, whose recession came a long time ago.

Having been fatally slow to react to paradigm shifts in music consumption that many saw coming with the advent of the internet, the main labels tried being litigious with file-sharers by taking a few of them to court and making an example out of them in the hope that everyone else would fall in line.

But file-sharing is impossible to police on a mass scale. Most of the offenders are young. Suing them is difficult – especially because many who download do so because they cannot afford to pay for music in the first place. The advent of Qtrax suggests a new pragmatism on the part of big record labels.

This is tantamount to confessing that they can no longer recover their costs by merely selling music to people who want to hear it. Help has been forthcoming in the form of companies who want their brands to be associated with music. Decades ago, bands had the privilege of affecting a certain reticence where advertising was concerned. These days, a well-placed song in an advert can launch a career.

Open up Q and NME and you struggle to distinguish editorial from advertorial. NME’s main sponsor – Shockwaves hair products - helps to sponsor the publication’s annual showcase tours of new bands. To older fans, it may be ironic that indie music – a genre once defined by its resistance to haircare – has come to this. Younger fans probably don’t know any different.

It’s hard not to see Qtrax as an admission of defeat by an industry that once took pride in having more integrity than other sectors of the corporate world. But the clues have been with us a long time. By their names alone, venues such as the O2 and Carling Apollo portended the realpolitik of the industry’s latest move to stay solvent.

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