I must comment again on the performer we saw last Wednesday at the Bedford Arms in London. He's called Vijay Kishore and his songs are haunting, beautiful and other good adjectives which might only demean him if I tried to use them in this blog as they would still understate how good he is. We all bought his CD after his gig, which, at the time, was a bit of a sort of statement of how much we enjoyed it, rather than, necessarily, a commitment to listen to these CDs a lot and get his songs stuck in our heads. I don't know about the others, but I've got Vijay in my head. I kind of like it.

The thing is, this sort of music is not guaranteed to make it to a wider audience. So, it's like a special secret. We've found a great musician that others don't know about. Now, I don't know how the music industry is going to go. It's possible that we'll see the end of the mainstream acts as we know it, and people will have a much more "My Music" focus on their music tastes, as they can download whatever they want into their iPod. Or, maybe things will stay as they are, and there'll be 100 Vijay Kishores working at a grass roots level and not getting the opportunities that lesser acts, like Girls A Fuckin' Loud, get. Who knows!?

It does strike me as amusing, though, that the likes of HMV are selling the mp3 players that may, one day, render the shop out of date. It's a bit like a butcher selling a really convincing guide to why vegetarianism is the best way forwards, or a Christian Science bookshop selling Richard Dawkins and Dan Brown books.

Thing is, without a mainstream music scene, maybe even more gems will get lost. After all, who would find them?