Gerry Hassan: Why music scene is becoming like a ghost town

Hard times are returning: mass unemployment, youth disaffection, students questioning the merits of higher education. These are the conditions for a musical landscape of rebellion and protest, of proto-Billy Braggs writing songs which capture our age. What, though, if the economic times turn severe and the musical soundtrack doesn't change? That there turns out to be no equivalent of the Smiths' The Queen is Dead or Manic Street Preachers' A Design for Life or Pulp's Different Class?

Music is at a crossroads, culturally and as an industry, in how it is consumed and understood. The decline of the "indie scene", once a powerful counter-cultural code post-punk mostly men through the 1980s, has left a huge chasm. The pivotal artists of this time: Joy Division/New Order, The Smiths/Morrissey, The Cure and Cocteau Twins, were not just musicians, but represented a way of life, a kind of alternative calling, which either explicitly or implicitly was very different from the mainstream.

Slowly and imperceptibly, indie music became an incestuous music of usually four men, their guitars and singer, playing to a law of diminishing returns. Witness the pale imitation of indie bands from The Killers to the Kaiser Chiefs. We can now see the Britpop explosion of the mid-1990s - Blur, Oasis and the more eclectic Pulp - as the last throws of indie: reifying the past, conservative, insular, referential about itself. And profoundly English.

Indie music was mostly English chauvinist, narrowly celebrating England's uniqueness and traditions, going on about the 1960s, Swinging London, 1977 and Year Zero, and Madchester, endlessly referenced in TV documentaries using the same half dozen talking heads. Dance music, disco, soul, and music which is about having fun and being irreverent doesn't get a look in. Step forward one Steven Patrick Morrissey, spokesperson for a generation, who has at least been consistent, writing over 20 years ago, Hang the DJ, railing against dance music, and last week, calling Chinese people a "sub-species".

Scotland had a slightly different experience but not completely so.The 1980s gave us the cultural nationalism of artists such as The Proclaimers, Hue and Cry, Deacon Blue and Runrig, which ran its course as Thatcherism blew up. We still have some artists, such as The Proclaimers and Michael Marra, making thoughtful, captivating records, and Celtic Connections is an international success, yet we have little music infrastructure, and the blanding out of the indie scene equally affects us north of the Border.

Music is everywhere now and nowhere. It is in our iPods, public spaces, adverts and films, and has become background noise by which we live our lives. A special mention must go to dance act Faithless, whose latest single has as its video a three-minute TV commercial for Fiat cars, but in today's commercially saturated culture even NME didn't condemn this.

The only music show on terrestrial TV is Jools Holland's Later… while one of the most coveted music spots is the oldest fogey in town - Andrew Marr - on his Sunday morning show. Music has become demeaned and cheapened by being everywhere, and not cared and loved by anyone, Jools apart.

The rise of downloads and the demise of the record company model has strengthened the homogenisation of music. A world promising endless choice has produced risk-averse banal record labels and artists. All of the majors against whom the indies used to rage are in trouble, while the space and aesthetic of a new indie movement couldn't be further away.

The mushrooming of talent shows such as The X Factor and the svengali power of Simon Cowell has diminished the once glorious British tradition of trashy, glitzy pop; in the past decade that wonderful feeling of ephemeral, yet transcendental pop has only been given voice by Girls Aloud from talent show, Popstars. What musical greats can Cowell claim to have given us? Will Young, Michelle McManus, Susan Boyle, the phrase "you made the song your own" and endless versions of Unchained Melody.

Music festivals were seen for a while as the new way of listening to music and for artists to make money, but the explosion of festivals can now be seen as the product of the boom. Glastonbury has become part of the English summer, an alternative Wimbledon, attended only by BBC staff and celebrities. As Paul Morley commented on Newsnight Review the music festival has lost any sense of being something different, culturally redolent of "the passivity of masses".

In a world where the Top 40 no longer counts and where we don't have Top of the Pops, does any of this really matter? Music provides a crucial means for us to interpret and understand our lives, and connect to our emotions and those of others. Without a music of subversion, dissent and politics our lives become more bland and banal, and just about "product".

Musical innovators will always emerge but the death of the single and album has so far presented musicians with problems.The single provided a way to breakthrough to a wider audience, while the album provided the platform for the "serious" artistic statement. This musical staleness won't continue indefinitely. The demise of the indie conceit can only be a good thing. While the crisis of the old record industry models opens up new opportunities and spaces, including for artists and bands to do things differently in Scotland.

Just don't expect, as unemployment hits three million again, for a modern equivalent of The Specials' Ghost Town to be rising to the top of the charts.