‘I wouldn’t work for you no matter what you paid/ And I may not be able to change the whole f..king world/ But I could be the million you never made.’

That was indie singer-songwriter Ani Difranco’s kiss-off to the mighty music industry circa 1995. But as it turns out, the real million-dollar mutinies against the record business are only just beginning. Recently, British band Radiohead shoved aside the big labels and directly put their latest album up for grabs on the Internet. Fans could pay what they thought fit, or not pay at all.

Sounds crazy? Get this: Radiohead CD sales have been just fine, and in fact the album topped the Billboard charts this past week.

What’s going on here? Well, lots of things, but primarily the crazy, counter-intuitive logic of the Internet that has busted all kinds of revenue models. Whether it’s music, publishing, entertainment, education, the Web threatens to simply take the bottom out of their businesses by supplying almost the same thing at no cost.

Just look at the sheer abundance of stuff you get for nothing. Blogs are giving journalists the jitters. Wikipedia’s the first stop if you want to know anything about anything. Open Courseware programs from schools like MIT give you access to the best higher education in the world, for free. Craigslist, a non-commercial US-based classifieds service, struck at the financial foundations of newspapers whose revenues depend on charging for the same kind of platform (its founding partner befuddled business journalists by politely passing up the chance to ‘monetise’). And let’s not even get into the illegal bounty out there on the Web. Entertainment, information, expertise — whatever you’re looking for, there’s a way to get it free, on tap, anytime. Right this moment, there’s an entire universe of people tapping away at their keyboards, all steady accretions towards this tremendous common resource.

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