There’s about four miles between where I live and where I work. It’s less bad luck or bad planning than pure economics: we rent space in the Computer Science building of the University of Cambridge, which is to the west of the city centre, and I live right over on the eastern edge, by an airport and a floodplain, and where the rents are a bit less arched-eyebrow than in the rest of town.

There are a few advantages though: when I’m crossing the Cambridge compass by bike, I get to cycle along the river – picturesque, as long as you don’t go head-first into a cow, and before you ask that’s not a metaphor – and it gives me a bit of time to listen to things. Recently, it’s been the audiobook version of Free by Chris Anderson. I’ve not finished it yet, so this isn’t anything like a review, but the chapter which I got to on the way home tonight (light drizzle, one close call with a gaggle of yellow-backpacked language students, fairly typical) triggered a few thoughts.

He was talking about 360-degree record deals: record labels, who’ve noticed that moving petrochemical residue and cardboard around the world doesn’t pay like it used to, are trying to get a share of tour income and T-shirt sales from the bands they sign. This is, politely speaking, a bit controversial. Alan McGee, ex-Creation Records:

The record industry’s demand for bands to sign over a portion of their merchandise and tour revenues as part of a recording contract is an admission that selling music is not a sustainable business model.

I’m way below small-time, but the only income I’ve ever seen from music has been the occasional £50 for DJing at a party. Even as a hobby, my little label couldn’t justify selling either CDs or MP3s: CDs are expensive and, unless your decor’s like mine (something out of High Fidelity) you don’t want the clutter. As for MP3s: if your music’s any good it’s going to wind up on BitTorrent or Soulseek. If it isn’t any good, it won’t, but then nobody cares anyway. In either case, you might as well give it away. In this world, what a big record company’s got left to offer is really expensive credit to (theoretically) spend on studio time and producers, their promotional might, and their contacts. If you’re making records by yourself, cheaply, and largely as promos to get people to book you, then all the record company has to offer you is the loan-sharking operation. For that matter, it’s bad news for record producers too: if most records get made on the cheap on laptops in back bedrooms – most dance music, and more and more indie, already is – then their role gets cost-cut right out of existence.

Anyway, after the record business, Chris Anderson moves on to talk about the technical/business book trade. It isn’t looking too clever right now either:

The market has been on a steady decline since mid-2008 and has continued downward right through the first half of 2009. And there are very few signs that the book-buying slump is going to turn around anytime soon… the market performance this year is the worst we’ve seen since the fall of of 2001.

On top of that, technical non-fiction has never made a lot of money for its authors: Chris Anderson states outright that his business model is to use his books as a way to get booked as a consultant and keynote speaker. All in all, with authors beginning to rattle sabres about piracy, the two industries are beginning to seem more and more alike.

Tim O’Reilly has pointed to diversification as one way to survive in the current financial climate, and that includes moving into events and personalised training. In other words: publishers making money from gigs. It’s not quite the same as record-company-style 360, but isn’t there something in common here? Many of the speakers we see at conferences made their names by writing for publishers like O’Reilly: if the same publishers then turn round and book them as speakers, based on the credibility granted by having published…

Of course, there’s nothing even slightly sinister going on here right now. It doesn’t hurt that O’Reilly are beyond reproach ethically! Still, what if one publisher were to break ranks? I can easily imagine someone trading a percentage of their speaking or consulting income for the marketing benefit of being the author of a book on a hot topic from a seemingly-kosher publisher.

Alternatively, as with record labels, maybe traditional publishers will be cut out entirely and books will be written online, turning into something between academic theses – proofs of qualification which hardly anyone really reads – and blogs (the route taken by the Django Book’s subediting-by-commenter). In that world, do publishers evolve into speaker bureaux with a print-on-demand addon, format-shifting books which live online into something you can read in the bath? It’d be a shame if that were to happen, but it was a downer when Too Pure went under too.

Or maybe something entirely new will evolve. It’s difficult to see how the present state of affairs hangs on.