Two posts in one day! But rarely do two items in the papers anger me so much. John Harris, ex-NME journo (from just before the time I joined), Socialist firebrand and now Guardian columnist, can usually be relied upon for sober, insightful and generally left-leaning comment.

In today’s Guardian, however, he seems to have been replaced with a deluded corporate shill.

Okay, so he’s being deliberately provocative (the Guardian’s general get-out clause for most of the poorly thought-through posts on their blog - if anything needs a quality filter, John, it’s that damn website). But he must know how the industry works - great albums tend to appear despite of, not because of, the record labels that release them.

It’s a business - of course the teams behind the Klaxons and Kasabian had an eye on the balance sheet. Klaxons had already sold out the limited edition release of ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, were being played by Lamacq, and were putting on amazing shows for fans who were swarming to their Myspace page by the time Polydor got involved. You could say Angular, who put out that first record, were doing it for the love of the band; Polydor’s moneymen, though, knew exactly what they were getting their hands on. If not, why are the musically-superior Hadouken still languishing in semi-obscurity? Because they’re too abrasive and will probably never make a label like Polydor the ton of cash that Klaxons (essentially a bog-standard indie band with ‘ravey’ sound effects) will.

Harris’s next point is to suggest that artists need labels so they can tell the band that their new single is shit and they should write a new one. You can point to arguments from both sides here: Blur’s ‘For Tomorrow’ was forced out of them by label head Dave Balfe because Modern Life Is Rubbish had no obvious singles (in his opinion) - it was a hit, and pushed them towards superstardom. But on the flipside, there’s countless artists, from Marvin Gaye (Berry Gordy initially refused to release What’s Going On) to Kelly Clarkson (who had a recent high-profile scrap with Clive Davis over her new album), who have had to battle with their blinkered labels to get their artistic vision on record.

Harris would have been better arguing that record labels serve a purpose in filtering out the crap from the good stuff. This, at least, holds some water. There’s more music out there than ever, and so many channels through which to consume it, that finding the talent is hard (this is, of course, where Last.fm comes in - shameless plug alert!!) But again, that line of thinking is still difficult to defend when the major labels are more and more run by lawyers and bankers with no knowledge of, or particular interest in, the artistic merit of the bands they’re pursuing.

In this article, Harris has obviously been influenced by record exec moaning about Radiohead’s new album release. “They wouldn’t be able to do it if they hadn’t had major label muscle behind them for 10 years helping make them this successful” is the general gist of the whining. I beg to differ. The people out there willing to pay £40 for the discbox - and there are hundreds of thousands of them, I don’t doubt - are hardcore fans, and they would have found Radiohead even if they’d never signed to EMI. Good music will out, ultimately.

The battle lines are not drawn between The Kids and The Man, as Harris puts it, but rather The Artists and The Man (in between, to draw on a metaphor from Steve Albini, is a trench of shit). I don’t doubt that some bands need managers to guide them, a PR company to help promote them, and maybe an A&R to make artistic suggestions - but just because labels can offer this support, does it justify the ruthless exploitation that we read about time and time again?

I’m not about to gleefully predict the death of record labels, like Alan McGee; but I’m not about to side with them, and as a music fan neither should you John.

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