Check out the Wikipedia list of the biggest-selling music albums of all time, and you’ll notice one thing immediately: all of them are old.

The most recent of the top 10 was released a decade ago. Most of the rest came out more than 30 years ago. The biggest of them all, Michael Jackson’s 110 million-selling Thriller, dates from 1982.

And it’s not just that the mega albums don’t happen anymore. Total sales are down dramatically too.

Why? The aging of the population has a bit to do with it. The Internet has a lot more to do with it. Also, according to Livingston Taylor, there just is not as much good music being made any more.

Now, Mr. Taylor is in his late 50s; the cynic might dismiss his judgment as the perennial lament of the aging that, “They just don’t make ‘em like that any more.” But that would be a mistake.

For he is not only a writer and performer of music, he is also a teacher, at the Berklee College of Music. And his young students, he says, bolster his view.

“If you ask my students what they’re listening to, 75 per cent of the music they have on their iPods was recorded before they were born,” he said, as we sat in the living room of his Martha’s Vineyard house.

“This was never the case with you and me. Then, the system was so good it was giving us dump trucks of great music.”

And earning dump trucks of money in return. Money for the artists and, at least as important, for the people he calls the “gatekeepers” — the recording industry and radio executives who decided what artists they would support, who weeded out the bad and mediocre artists and mentored the good ones.

“Show me any time in history where there has been great art without talent and money concentrated,” he challenged.

Consider the de Medici family. First they ran the bank, then the Catholic church, then they patronized the arts.

“This is what brought us Leonardo and Michaelangelo,” he said.

The same applies in today’s world. Money makes art possible.

The conundrum is this. In the digital age, he said: “Everybody has the infinite option of getting their music, their writing, their photographs out through the Internet to the whole world.”

But though this access was democratizing, in that it let many more people show their stuff, most of that stuff was not of high quality, and there was no “mentor/apprentice” system to help polish it and then deliver it to a wider audience.

“God save us from democracy in our artistic endeavor,” said Mr. Taylor.

And even when something good did emerge — he cited the example of Susan Boyle, the frumpy, fifty-something Scottish woman who became an instant YouTube singing sensation a few months back — it was not rewarded.

“So Susan Boyle has four million downloads and not a single one pays revenue,” he said.

“So there’s no reason for an infrastructure to invest in her. Or any of us, for that matter.

“This is the most pressing problem we face as creators of digitizable art. We have to find a way of getting a revenue stream.”

Until someone works out how to do this, he said, not only the music industry but also newspapers, publishing, television and movies will continue their downward spiral.

In the case of music, all that was left was live performance, but that, too was affected by the disintegration of the industry.

“Once, record companies financed tour support and in doing that would teach a young group how to be terrific,” he said.

So that’s the bad news, although Mr. Taylor remains confident that people will soon work out how to make music pay again in the digital age.

The good news is that there are still good young artists coming along.

“There is some terrific music being made, but you have to weed through it,” said Mr. Taylor.

“I’m lucky; I have students to do that. I say: ‘You root around in the leaves until you find a truffle. I can’t do it.’ ”

He is lucky, too, in that he made his career when there were mentors. He’s had A& R men tell him when he was producing bad product, and is grateful for that.

And he can record and play with the best people. The established ones — who he says these days mostly reside in Nashville, the last bastion as the music scenes in New York and Los Angeles have declined — and the new ones who cross his path at Berklee and here on the Vineyard.

“The quality of music that has come off this Island for a long time is amazing,” he said. He puts it down, jokingly to something in the water, and more seriously to the music programs in the Island schools, particularly the West Tisbury School, which has “just produced a continuous stream of good people.

“The Vineyard is remarkable in its musical output.”

And so, when he plays his annual gig at the Tabernacle Saturday night, Mr. Taylor will feature one of his Berklee students, Liz Longly (“great player, great singer”), and an Island band he first saw a couple of years back, playing on the Menemsha dock — Ballywho.

And later in the year, he will have a new album, tentatively titled Last Alaska Moon. He didn’t say much about it (he got sidetracked into a soliloquy on the State of Alaska), except that it will be all original material except for one cover, a duet with his Island-based musical nephew Ben Taylor, of Michael Jackson’s The Girl is Mine.

An Evening with Livingston Taylor at the Tabernacle in Oak Bluffs begins at 8 p.m. on Saturday, August 15. Admission is $20, or $35 for premium seating. Tickets available at the door or in advance at Island Music or Bunch of Grapes Bookstore in Vineyard Haven; C’est La Vie or the Cottage Museum Shop in Oak Bluffs; Aboveground Records in Edgartown; Alley’s General Store in West Tisbury; or online at mvcma.org.