In this regular column, we give members of the British Record Producers Guild the chance to air their views on recording related matters. This month, Bros producer Nicky Graham tells of his vision of the future.

When I think about the relationship between making and selling records to earn a living, I have a vision of the future which I find intriguing, and to a certain extent worrying, if it turns out to be correct.

Historically, the tradition has been to release music on some portable medium — be that vinyl, cassette, CD (plus DCC and Minidisc in the foreseeable future) — and to make money from the sale of that medium to the general public. If you are also a songwriter you get paid according to record sales, with extra income through performance every time the record is played on the radio or the television. But declining record sales and the problems caused by copying have already made it harder for artists — particularly if they are not also songwriters — to survive.

My vision of the future is only likely to add to these problems. It may be a hypothetical situation at the moment, but with the way technology is advancing, I believe it won't be long before it becomes reality.

The way I see it working is this: we are moving into an age where we are becoming more and more sedentary, where we sit in front of the television more and go out less. The next step is obvious; we will be able to listen to our music — and in some cases even watch our music on the television — using Teletext to access it from a central indexing system which will list every album available. Once accessed, it will be played back through our TVs linked to our own stereos, with the video simultaneously appearing on our television screens. Imagine you becoming the DJ on your own Teletext MTV!

This way we won't need to buy records at all. We will simply decide what we want to hear, call up the index and then, by using an access code, have it instantly available in our own homes. Once we have finished listening to the album, we may want to hear it again — or even just a couple of tracks, all of which will be possible by going back to the Teletext index and accessing it again.

A system like this could be used to make our own selections from a number of different albums. We could pick the tracks we want to hear and the time we want to hear them, then simply push a button and dance all night to our own personal compilation coming direct through our own stereos. We would be billed for what we used through some form of automatic direct billing system and it could work out a lot cheaper than buying records or CDs.

This may seem very futuristic, but when you consider that you can already use telephone modems to transmit digital information from one recording studio to another, from one side of the world to another, I don't see why this shouldn't become reality — particularly with the advent of Nicam digital stereo. My worry is that it will be all too easy to copy onto cassette your favourite selection for use in the car. As a partial consolation, at least there is one payment for the first use rather than none, as would be the case if you copy from the radio or from someone else's CD.

If record sales drop even more as a result of a system like this, it is bound to affect the artists, song writers, managers, producers, publishers and record companies who all depend on record sales to make their living, unless we work out now a sensible and equitable way of distributing the income generated from rentals, so that everyone benefits.

We already know that the business of copyright is a complex issue, so we should be getting the industry to talk about this before technology backs us all into a corner. If we don't act now we could end up in a situation where distributing income generated by this new-style technology becomes a nightmare that will take forever to sort out. Then everyone will suffer.

I want to see a system established where everyone involved in making music is able to make a decent living. I don't want to see the British music industry disappearing down the pan in the way the British film industry has. I believe we have a huge amount of innovative talent in this country and that in terms of creativity, we are still world beaters. But unless we give our artists and songwriters the chance to make a decent living from their music and the record companies the financial strength to invest in new talent, the whole industry in the UK will suffer.

Unless you are a very successful act, it is already very difficult to make a living. For bands where sales income has to be split four or five ways, it is even harder, and the cost of touring is prohibitive.

My vision of the future may be a long way off, but I think it will happen at some point over the next ten years. Between now and then, we have to establish a system of control so that when the technology becomes available we, as an industry, are ready for it. The obvious way of doing this would be to set up a centralised computer linked to the accessing computer which logs all money accrued and then credits those involved, using relevant details from their contracts. You might think I'm talking science fiction here, but I've got a feeling I'm not — and there are plenty of others in the business who feel the same way.

Obviously, some people will still want their own CDs and these will still be available, but for those of us who are lazy — and that's most of us — a Teletext system will be preferred because it's easy, instant and at the end of the day it will give us all access to a much wider choice of music, which can only be a good thing.