In a recent New York magazine, its tech-media beat writer Michael Wolff has proposed one possible post-MP3 future: A music business that’s more like the book business.

Wolff’s premise: Manufactured teen-pop acts are rapidly reaching their inevitable sell-by date. Commercial radio is becoming ever more corporate and ever more unlistenable. The Internet, MP3 trading, and home CD-R burning are furthering the indie-rock agenda of shunning rock-star decadence and championing a more direct rapport between artists and audiences.

Therefore, a record industry built around trying to make every release go multiplatinum is doomed. Also doomed is the whole industry infrastructure of waste and hype (“independent” promoters, payola, limos, drugs, hookers, mansions, plastic surgeons, promotional junkets for journalists, etc. etc.)

Instead, recordings will have to be sold more like books are. While there will still be some bestsellers, for the most part artists will carefully construct works that a few people will really love. Street-savvy marketers will promote these works to an infinite array of tiny niche markets.

If Wolff’s prediction comes true, we just might also expect a few other changes in the way music is made and sold, such as the following:

• Groupies will start dressing more like undergrad teaching assistants.
• Following the hardcover-paperback timeline, artists will release the deluxe box set first, then the single disc in the plastic jewel box.
• Instead of Jaegermeister and Chee-Tos, chianti and brie.
• Instead of moshpits, discussion circles.
• Volvos replace limos.
• The new “Oprah’s Record Club” turns listeners onto the tastefully dramatic, housewife-friendly tuneage of tomorrow’s Sarah McLachlans and Natalie Merchants.
• MTV’s schedule includes the highly-edited “reality” adventures of everybody’s favorite wacky celebrity family on The Updikes.

I was going to ponder if ecru sweaters and tweed jackets would become the new rocker uniform, but then I remembered Belle and Sebastian.