Of all the art forms, song would seem to be the most democratic, the most accessible. Anybody can sing. You don't need money, you don't need expertise, you don't need permission, you don't need sophisticated technology or skilled guidance or expensive instrumentation. There is nothing to prevent you, in your bath or doing the washing-up or stuck in a traffic jam, from opening your mouth and pouring out your soul in song. But for the most part you don’t. You switch on the radio, press the CD play button, plug your iPod into your ears, tune in to Spotify. And you consume.

The illusion is that song is freely available. It belongs to everybody. Song is everywhere, blasting through the loudspeakers, filtering through the walls, hovering over your restaurant table, accompanying your pub conversations, jingling around in your head even when you don't want it to. The reality is that song is the private property of business organisations, and by ‘song’ I mean not only individual songs but the whole song idiom; the idiom in which you might find your own voice has been appropriated by the market.

Internet platforms, YouTube, self-financed recordings have made it easier for groups wanting to express themselves in song to put their music into the public arena. But the power structure of the music business is largely unchanged, and without the backing of record companies, publishers, agents, the media, they will find it difficult to survive. And with that backing, the connections to the communities they were rooted in is inevitable severed.

In the West Coast of the United States in the 1960s, there was an eruption of popular music which sprang from the student-hippie community of the Bay Area. It was the alternative culture, it was peace and love. It was community control and the battle for People's Park in Berkeley. It was opposition to the US war in Vietnam and the commercial values of straight Amerika. It was rejection of the institution of marriage and the work ethic. It was sex and drugs as a voyage of self-discovery. The music, fusing rock and folk, was, at the outset, created within the community and controlled by the musicians themselves. The songs, many overtly political, were not so much a commercial product or an entertainment package as an expression of the values of that community.