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This is the documentary on the BBC World Service. My name's Sam York and I'm an aspiring singer-songwriter.

Nearly 40 years ago a French economist called Jacques Attili

predicted that the value of recorded music would crash. I'm going to meet him in an

effort to find out if I can ever make a living from my own music.

This is The new song.

I'm still trying to get those guitars to sit right.

I'm on my way to play a gig. It's been an interesting ride for me.

I've played alongside Ed Sheeran and Jesse Jay as a session musician,

but now I'm trying to make it as a solo artist. But it's not easy to make money

from your own music and it's not just me my friends in the industry say the same.

I remember this book my old university lecturer gave to me,

written way back in the 1970s before anyone had heard of the internet or the MP3.

It was hard work, it was dense and it was full of academic jargon, but it stuck with me.

Because whoever had written it predicted the turmoil the industries going through today

with astonishing accuracy. The book was called Noise and the author was a Frenchman

called Jacques Attily. He wrote it in 1976. That was the biggest selling record the year Jacques wrote his book. A lot's changed since then. The recorded music industry skyrocketed in the 80s and 90s, but then crashed dramatically at the turn of the century. Attle seemed to see this coming. He said we were on the cusp of a crisis of proliferation,

and that soon there'd be so much recorded music that its value would plummet.

Sounds pretty much like what's happened to me. And some of the

leading figures in the industry that I've been talking to agree. Making a living when scarcity is now busted is a real problem.

I think it's like standing in front of a train and screaming to it to stop, you know, it's not going to happen.

...