A few people have remarked in various postings I've come across that it is the fact that I have money that makes it possible for me to accept Napster-facilitated copyright infringements.

I have enough money, but I do not have a surplus large enough to allow me to help all those I would like to help without having to work - that is why I often perform for charity when I would obviously prefer to continue to write in my studio, or go sailing.

The point is that artists have never really had a choice in the past. If a record company would not sign you, and sometimes in the 80s it was hard to get A&R people to even visit showcase performances of new bands and singers, you simply had to press your own CDs and sell them at the few gigs available.

Today you can use one of the many wesbites (like PeopleSound here in the UK http://www.peoplesound.com/index.htm) which offer both free audition and royalty-based downloading to their subscribers. I assume there is nothing to stop a new artist making tracks available on Napster.

Once that is done though, how do you draw further attention to yourself? How do you then prove that you are alive?

When I wrote Lifehouse in 1971 my feeling was that the internet future would lead us back to social congregations of various kinds. Lawnmower Man was on the TV here in the UK last night, and I was reminded that when it was released most people still believed that what internet surfers would want would be oblivion or psychedelic experience. In fact they want human contact or some synthesis of it.

Artists have always been accused of pretentiousness or pomposity whenever they have tried to argue that their work has a high intention. I will go on regardless.

My responsibility as an artist is to point to the fact that art is merely a portal. A theatre show brings you in, then sends you back out again. What happens inside the theatre must engage and hold the audience, but what is the playwright's reason for wanting an audience in the first place? For example, what is Quadrophenia actually FOR? (I take it for granted that we want our art to first entertain).

I wrote it to show, and share, that even a working-class life in West London in the early '60s - drug use, scooters, obsessive fashion, well-paid but mindless work, street violence - could lead to the beginning of a spiritual journey. That might be obvious today, but - at the time the Mod movement was happening - the magic that drove it was generally misundestood. Later (when the album was released in 1973) it was felt by some social commentators and critics to be a nonsense to say that anything that 'Mod' men and women got up to in those days mattered. But it did matter and it still does. It mattered because it reflected a deep and usually frustrated desire to develop spiritually - to be bigger, better, more aware, finer. Put simply, they wanted to get higher.

I write music today for just two reasons; neither have anything to do with money. I want to get higher and I want human contact (preferably not solely via the internet!)

Where Napster can help me, and it seems BMI may have failed thus far, is by extending the portal more widely. If BMI http://www.bmi.com and record companies - and any other institutions involved in collecting and distributing money on behalf of artists - were to do their job perfectly I would today have a lot more money. But more importantly, I would have a bigger audience.

But no one is capable of perfection and I do not demand it. But more money would allow me more freedom to work.

What is the point here? The point is that the old systems will fall away within the next 20 years. When popular artists are allowed to control the means (and rewards) of their own production and distribution you have an almost perfect Marxist situation. Many artists will fail miserably to rise to the need for social responsibility. But this will create a new kind of popular artist: art-radicals, art-terrorists, self-fuelled and financed by benefaction or patronage.

Today banks are starting to line up to bankroll artists who wish to set up their own direct portal to their audience. Of course at the moment only established artists are being courted. But soon banks will realise that an important place to look for talent is PeopleSound, not just the Rich List.