GALUPO: Aimee Mann’s deathly prognosis for music industry

If anyone should be in an “I told you so” mood, it’s Aimee Mann. In 1999, the alternative-pop-inclined singer-songwriter wriggled out from a major label contract and went guerrilla: She formed her own imprint, SuperEgo Records, and began selling records through her Web site.

This was before anyone realized Napster was about to jostle the tectonic plates beneath the mainstream music industry. Before anyone had heard of audioblogs or MySpace or digital rights management.

Miss Mann saw the writing on the wall. More accurately, she saw that the wall was crumbling.

So is she chortling while Rome burns?

Hardly.

“We’re all going down,” says Miss Mann, who is to appear Saturday night at the 9:30 Club in support of her latest album, “@#%&*! Smilers.”

“It’s our little global warming. I feel like a polar bear standing on a last little sliver of ice,” she says. “Hopefully, when the ice completely melts, we’ll find a way to adapt.”

Miss Mann, who’s chatting over the phone, is given to a morose sort of humor, which won’t surprise longtime fans of her dark and intelligent songbook. She turns 48 in a week and has seen enough of the music industry from the inside to know that a songwriter of her singularity is far better off on the outside.

“I was delighted to get out of the major-label system,” she says.

For about five minutes, Miss Mann was a spiky-haired post-new-wave hit maker (‘Til Tuesday’s “Voices Carry” was a Top 10 single in 1985). Around the same time she quit the majors, she surfaced as the muse and soundtrack star of director Paul Thomas Anderson’s acclaimed movie “Magnolia.”

Yet, for the bulk of her career, Miss Mann has remained unfailingly inner-directed and comfortably below the radar.

This is why she’s immune to the hype about today’s indie culture. Where the creative-destruction boosters see the demise of quasi-monopolistic conglomerates as the space in which a thousand indie flowers will bloom, Miss Mann sees a slow-motion avalanche that’s pulverizing everything on its way downhill.

“Everybody’s affected,” she says. “The musicians are affected. Studios are affected. Engineers are affected. … Someone like me, when my record sales are cut in half, I don’t know if we can make another record.”

Miss Mann foresees an increasingly vast chasm between disposable mass-marketed jingles and virtually everything else - including, quite possibly, her own eternally displaced music - which will be driven underground and cultivated by smaller and smaller niches.

Despite modest overhead - she sleeps on the bus - Miss Mann says she doesn’t make a profit even from touring.

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