'We want to be No 1": at a time of relative gloom for the music business, you can't accuse the industry body UK Music of ducking a challenge. In Liberating Creativity, the glossy report in which it lays out its aims for the decade, UK Music says it wants Britain to "challenge the United States" for the position of the world's top music producer. At first it sounds preposterous, but who knows, maybe we can do it – if Taio Cruz can get a US chart-topper then anything's possible.

But it's interesting to see who gets a part in this national epic and who doesn't. In Liberating Creativity, the organisations – of artists, labels, publishers and licensing bodies – that make up UK Music lead the way, and then the report names other stakeholders: "producers, engineers, studios, promoters, distributors, A&R, designers, marketers, retailers, lawyers …" It mentions the other creative industries, the infrastructure of live music, media old and new. The future of music is an orgy of business models, a whirl of "new partners" from brands to ISPs to pie-makers.

After all of those have been dealt with, it mentions the fans. "As consumption changes," the report says, "so does music's relationship with fans." And we move swiftly on to more figures about how many jobs the biz creates.

The fans, after all, are a bit of a sticking point on UK Music's path to glory. Because they will keep on using those pesky unlicensed services and downloading copyrighted material – problems Liberating Creativity expresses fears about. UK Music is right to be worried – music is valuable and musicians should be compensated for making it. But if anyone's a "new partner" in the music business these days, it's the fans. They're the ones promoting the music on social networks, uploading fan videos and homebrew remixes. They're creating the atmosphere that makes live music more of a draw than ever before, they're the ones buying – yes, buying – more singles than at any time in British music history. And they're doing this at the same time as they're downloading whole discographies via BitTorrent and sending leaked MP3s on Gmail. Underlying UK Music's report is the assumption that the licensed activity and the unlicensed activity are separable, that you can punish the latter without hurting the former. But what if that's not true – what if, as several studies of piracy and music purchasing seem to suggest, the good fans and the bad fans are the same people?

The music biz isn't the first British leisure industry to have a suspicious, even adversarial relationship with its own fans. Another of last week's news stories hints at a way out of it. The government's startling proposals to require football clubs to let fan organisations take a stake of up to 25% in their ownership – with windows of opportunity for full takeovers in certain cases – represent possible legal recognition of the principle of fan involvement. As Dave Boyle, head of fans organisation Supporters Direct, put it, this is "long overdue recognition that clubs aren't businesses like any other".

Football fans have a long history of being ignored, belittled and viewed with suspicion both by the authorities and the businesses that rely on them. The parallels are far from exact, but back in the 1980s, fans of some clubs endured a near-presumption of criminality that mirrors the music industry's perception of file-sharers now. Football has undertaken a long journey away from this, and even now fan involvement isn't the norm – a lot of clubs still prefer to treat their fans as walking piggybanks. But the Labour proposals at least recognise that without the fans, there is no sport.

And without the fans, there is no music business either, let alone a world-beating one. No need to talk about 25% takeovers of record labels, but why not a vocal and strong fan organisation under the UK Music umbrella? If one existed it could be a powerful ally in their many positive campaigns – for live music and music education – as well as a corrective voice in defence of music lovers. I'm not trying to suggest that music fans are always right, and of course there are freeloaders who contribute nothing to art, fandom or business. But if UK Music really is serious about becoming the best and most productive music industry in the world, it has to take us with it.