The Delgados' beautiful album Hate is an example of what bands could do 20 years ago when we valued music – Euan McColm

The album stops me in my tracks. It’s an extraordinarily ambitious affair, full of indestructible songs. I listen to the opening track, The Light Before We Land, four times on the trot before letting Hate play on. I like this record more than I’d realised. I’ve been playing it for days. On the album, the band is accompanied by more than 20 guest musicians. There’s a choir, a string section, brass players.

As the record plays on, I ask myself a question. Could a band like The Delgados make Hate today? The music industry has so radically changed, would it be financially viable to spend the best part of a hundred grand on recording an album by a band with steady but relatively modest sales of around 40,000 albums (on vinyl and CD) in the UK and the same again across the rest of the world? I doubt it very much.

I turn to the band’s drummer Paul Savage for advice. He shares my doubt. The death of sales and dominance of streaming app Spotify and the concomitant contraction of the music industry means huge restrictions on what even the highest-profile artists are able to do. The era when bands like The Delgados could make records of great scope is long gone.

The Delgados started with enough cash to press up and release their debut single in 1995. Soon, their record label – Chemikal Underground – was releasing critically and commercially successful albums by other bands, such as Mogwai and Arab Strap. Through a series of licensing agreements with other small record labels, bands could boost sales overseas, easily matching their UK numbers.

Investing profits into recording meant they could make increasingly ambitious records until, after the release of their Mercury-nominated third album “The Great Eastern”, Mantra records – a subsidiary of the Beggars Banquet label – reckoned they were worthy of investment and supported the expensive recording of Hate.

Sales of around 80,000 records and CDs might not have created a life of abundant luxury, but they made the band viable, allowing them to tour and build their following. If each of Hate’s ten tracks was streamed 80,000 times, the band would make little more than three grand.

Once in a blue moon a band – the Arctic Monkeys, say, or Wet Leg – reaches the higher echelons of the music business. They gain a status that means – because the money’s there – full creative freedom.

But for smaller bands, it’s increasingly difficult. Many labels are interested only in licensing these artists’ records, leaving all the upfront costs with the band members. Unless those individuals are wealthy, making a record as grand in scale as Hate would be impossible. The Delgados didn’t just create a beautiful album in 2002, they made something which stands as a reminder of what was possible in the days when we valued music.