Do you know something? This week marks my five-hundredth music column for MK News (and previously Milton Keynes On Sunday). You're probably wondering how that can be, and possibly even why they've allowed me to get away with this for so long. Well, they're a decent lot here so I ought to thank them for putting up with me thus far, especially seeing as most people only do two weeks' work experience - with 500 under my belt that must surely be a record. I should really acknowledge the support of my huge and loyal army of readers too - the fact that both of you still occasionally read these things makes it all worthwhile. Anyway, speaking of records, even though you young whippersnappers like to call them downloads these days... that's the wonder of the digital age, see. Compact discs are obsolete, you know, they went the way of the cassette (kids, ask your parents) and the flexi-disc (kids, don't bother). These days, it's all about buying the latest gadgets and staying right up to date. And vinyl records as well, they've made a comeback in recent years, but forget about those, concentrate on the lovely MP3 players instead. Music collections these days aren't huge great big racks of vinyl, they're tiny little matchboxes made out of aluminium, plastic and sheep that can store every song that's ever been recorded plus a few that haven't even been written yet. You can plug them into the very latest computers that use more processing power to eject a memory stick than it took to send Apollo 11 to the Moon and if they're not actually cleverer than you then that's only because you haven't got the latest Service Pack. And with all these technological wonders at our disposal, what are the kids of the 21st Century downloading?

RHYTHM IS A DANCER

Snap!

That's what. A sixteen year old song, probably older than half the people downloading it. What does that say for the state of the music industry today? Actually, probably lots of good things. Gone are the days when you'd hear an old song on the telly and if the record company couldn't be bothered to re-issue it that would be the end of it. Nowadays, it doesn't matter what the record company thinks. If you like a song, you go on the Internet, cough up a few pennies and hoy bungo! You've got another tune for your collection. So what if the first time you ever heard it was when you saw a puppet dancing to it on the telly? It doesn't matter. Let's face it, you're likely to hear more new music during commercial breaks than you are on some radio stations, but that's the way things have gone these days. It's not like you can nip into Boots for this week's No.1 single anymore is it? Besides, it's a good song and that counts for an awful lot, especially now. Singles don't get deleted on the day of release nowadays so there's no rush, and there's not so much hype leading up to release dates - quite frankly, the landscape's changed entirely since I started writing these columns in 1998, and thank Heavens for that. Generally, if a song gets into the Top 40 these days it's got there on merit rather than marketing, so for an older song to re-appear in the upper reaches is no mean feat. Yes, I know the line "I'm as serious as cancer when I say rhythm is a dancer" is a little controversial, but what's he going to say? "I'm as serious as a traffic warden in a car park?" "I'm as serious as someone sitting their A-Levels without revising properly?" No. The line may be a little tasteless, but it rhymes and Turbo B's leaving you in no doubt as to his position on the matter, so at the end of the day it does the job. And while we're talking about old songs, how about

SINGIN' IN THE RAIN

Mint Royale

Three years ago, I couldn't say enough nice things about this. "Mint Royale have approached this song from a slightly different angle, namely from above - they've flown straight into it at ninety degrees, crawled out of the wreckage without a scratch and then created a brand new song from whatever can be salvaged", I said. I called it a "gem", a "masterclass" and said it fully deserved to go to Number One... and that's where I went wrong. I put the Kiss Of Death on it. Stupid, stupid Simon. In the end, it was lucky to get as high as twentieth in the Hit Parade before tumbling towards the bargain buckets. Maybe where they went wrong was having Gene Kelly dancing to it in the Volkswagen advert - as we now know, a 14 year old schoolboy is far better suited for Singin' In The Rain than Gene Kelly ever was. It seems so obvious now. As I'm writing this, the tune's No.1 in the midweek charts, and that's despite being handicapped by me liking it, so if you're reading this and it didn't get there in the end, blame me. When you really get down to it though, what this song proves is that if you fail first time round, it's not necessarily the end of the story. Which of course, is exactly as things should be.