For Radio 4 documentary The Pop Star and the Prophet, musician Sam York set out to meet Jacques Attali, an unorthodox French political theorist who predicted the decline of the music industry decades before it occurred. This is what he learned.

As a musician, I’d like to assure you that the crisis in the music industry is real. Behind all the anonymous statistics about declining album sales, and the pitiful incomes reported from streaming platforms, rank-and-file musicians are struggling to survive. Almost every musician I know has secretly confessed thoughts of jacking it in, finding some other income, because the future seems so hopeless. Many of those I’ve spoken to are the 'lucky ones’ who have gigs, audiences and recording contracts.

Sam York (right) with Jacques Attali He told me about the intimate relationship between music and power"

It’s still unclear whether the the music industry is going through a prolonged transitional phase, soon to reach a glorious new equilibrium, or whether it has been permanently withered by events of the last decade and a half. It’s easy to find proponents of both views.

Throughout the turbulence of the last 15 years, the ideas of an unorthodox French thinker have helped me to make sense of these changes. Writing almost 40 years ago, as a political theorist far removed from the world of music, Jacques Attali claimed that the music industry was headed on a path towards self destruction. He foresaw a time when the vast number of recordings available would make charging for music impossible. He believed the record business would destroy itself through an excessive reproduction of recordings - like a cancer that destroys its host through an excess of cells. But it wasn’t all bad - he saw this as a new opportunity for musicians and listeners to reclaim music as a shared experience, free from the corrupting influence of money.

Importantly, he saw music as a pioneering cultural phenomenon - at the cutting edge of human societal development and a powerful economic and political harbinger. All of the major economic developments in human history, he believed, happened first in music. He claimed that the ways in which we created, consumed and shared music could show us where we were all headed.

I was fascinated by his ideas and what they might mean for me, as a musician, so I went to meet him. Standing on a rainy but elegant Parisian boulevard, hearing a thin voice crackle through an ancient intercom system, he invited me in.

I was extremely nervous about meeting Jacques Attali. No one in the music industry had seen this crisis coming, but he had - decades in advance. It felt like I was meeting music’s Nostradamus. Although, this was probably the least of his achievements. As well as authoring over 60 books on a vast array of subjects, he had advised French President Francois Mitterrand for over a decade, organised a G7 summit and become first president of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. No slouch, then.

Here I was, a singer-songwriter, trying to find out if I could make a living.