The death today of John Barry, the British filmscore composer, prompted me to select five Barry pieces suitable to be sent off to.

Just ten seconds of a John Barry score could tell you all you needed to know about the movie. The melodies and arrangements added excitement, atmosphere, mystery and interest to every film he wrote for.

Such was his ability to create aural moods and sound pictures that at times listening was more enjoyable than watching.

Commenting on his death, British film composer David Arnold said that James Bond wouldn’t have been half as cool without John Barry holding his hand, as good an epitaph as you can get.

I already had a couple of favourites, Goldfinger and Born Free. In 1964 I was a country boy visiting relatives in London when they took me to see Goldfinger in a huge and glamourous cinema. The introduction music and graphics made me tingle. It summoned up the swinging 60s and I still recall it vividly.

Born Free? Well, a lovely piece of music to go with a marvellous film. John Barry’s score suited the script so well.

But choosing the other three pieces was incredibily difficult because he had written so many wonderfully evocative, haunting, thrilling melodies, each with an emotional appeal that would be suitable for the farewell event.

You will have to go to the article to see which three selections made up the five, and I hope you think they are good choices. I’m tempted to reallocate my time this week to listen to more of his filmscores, certain that I’ll hear melodies and arrangements that will fill me with joy and pleasure.

Paradoxical then that John Barry’s death confirmed to me the wonderful variety of music from all genres from which farewell pieces can be selected.

So, don’t put up with the limited and clichéd choices put in front of you by funeral directors, funeral planners and well meaning relatives.

Let your soul and imagination soar…recall the music that changed your life…spend time going through the My Last Song music pages…and whatever you do, make sure you go out on the right note.

It may seem unlikely but the best two funeral websites in the world are run by UK companies.

A top ten list was compiled earlier this month by US funeral guru Brian Burkhardt. And heading the chart was London based My Last Song followed by The Good Funeral Guide, run out of Birmingham.

The other places were taken by US websites.

I was surprised that My Last Song had been awarded the number one slot.

In the past two years there’s been a big increase in the number of funeral websites. They are particularly popular in the US, so for My Last Song to be chosen as the best in the world by an American funeral expert is quite an honour.

Charles Cowling, who started his website in 2009 to promote his book The Good Funeral Guide, is equally pleased. “There’s a lot of global ideas-swapping around the topic of funeral customs and how they are evolving, especially in the English speaking world. This is a flattering accolade.”

What is it about funeral information that makes it so web-friendly?

First is that while people are reluctant to talk to their friends and family about their mortality and the funeral they want, a website is emotionally neutral and gives positive advice. It’s not going to cry or ask to be left money.

Second, the huge increase in ‘silver surfers’ means that more older people are accessing the internet to find relevant information.

Third is type of information being offered by websites that appeal to the ageing baby boomers.  Fifty years ago this group redefined youth culture. Now they are challenging funeral traditions. They want funerals that match their lifestyles, their beliefs, their achievements and their interests and websites like My Last Song give them the information, for instance music choices, they like.

As Charles Cowling emphasises, “This demographic is simply not going to accept a dreary traditional ‘cut and paste’ farewell event to mark their lives. They will want colourful, celebratory and upbeat funerals.” And funeral websites are meeting their needs.

Funeral planning and advice might be a niche market, but the demographics suggest it will be very big in a few years time.

I was convinced My Last Song would be a success when I analysed the population figures. “According to the Office of National Statistics, there will be almost 7 million people aged 70 and over in 2015 in England alone.  In 2020 this rises to 8 million.

The other interesting statistic is that there were less than half a million deaths registered in the UK in 2009 and that between 1999 and 2009, death rates fell by more than a quarter. So people are living longer which means they will be our customers for longer, visiting the websites more often, buying funeral plans, writing and editing their wills, wanting more information about age related illnesses, care options, and how to enjoy a longer and more active older age.

My Last Song has in-depth advice on all these issues, and expects to monetise the website within two or three years with affiliate agreements, sponsored pages and click throughs to companies wanting to reach this demographic.

I’m also planning to launch a US version of the site in 2012 and now looking for collaborators across the Atlantic.

There are more people in the US, they spend more per head on their funerals and they love music, which is an important driver for visitors to My Last Song.

Cowling’s business model is more simple. He uses his website as a first port of call for anyone needing to plan a funeral and find a good funeral director. It also carries updates to his book.

He has a listing of outstanding funeral directors UK-wide to which he is constantly adding.  “People increasingly want unique funerals for unique

The Good Funeral Guide website also carries a lively and provocative blog which enjoys a world-wide readership.

There are lots of jokes about the funeral business being a dying industry, but for these two UK companies, there’s a lot to look forward to.

A ‘good death’ is becoming more discussed as more people get older. The increasing numbers of people aged 70 and over coincides with other societal changes including the breakdown of the family support system, fewer people with strong religious beliefs and reduced resources for a health service that will have to deliver more end of life care.

The previous Government, aware of the growing need to address the issues, launched an End of Life Care strategy in July 2008. The strategy is supported by National End of Life Care Programme and £286 million of Government money.

It’s informative to visit the website and look at the vast amount of work that is being done as part of the programme. The work, the goodwill, the case studies, the references to publications would be commendable if there was a clear focus on what the programme wants to achieve: high quality, person-centred care for all adults at the end of life and enabling more people nearing end of life to choose where they die.

However, the Programme has grown like topsy and the more it grows, the further it is from achieving these aims.

It is a good example of the wasteful cost and confusion of trying to find a top down solution to what is the most individual of any health care situation – caring for a dying person.

So far the mixture of academics, care workers, medical professionals, think tank researchers and other well meaning individuals have not found the solution and they never will.

The present government recognises that inflexible, bureaucratic, centrally imposed and expensive solutions to society’s complex problems are doomed to failure. It is redefining the state’s relationship with civil society by reducing the role and cost of the state and hoping to increase personal and community responsibility and participation.

The success or failure of this experiment will define society’s progress for the first half of the 21st century.

As far as the end of life care is concerned, delivering a good death requires more emotional capital to be invested than currently the case and less money than currently anticipated.

Planning a ‘good death’ must involve family, friends and appropriate medical professionals. Coming together to address the subject of death and dying will necessarily overcome the still common fear of discussing the subject until it is literally too late.

There is not a great deal of point spending large amounts of money on end of life care as death can’t be defeated only delayed. Of course, the pain, suffering and fear can be managed and reduced but this shouldn’t be expensive.

If GPs and palliative care specialists insisted that patients completed a personal death plan, and if family members felt comfortable in encouraging older loved ones to fill in their plans, a good death would be a far more likely outcome than anything that will emerge from the current hotchpotch of case studies and models coming out of the National End of Life Care Programme.

Important players in changing attitudes will be the excellent hospice movement and the Dying Matters Coalition which, if properly funded, could lead the move to rid our society of the taboo surrounding death and dying. If people talk about death and plan for it – their own or that of an ailing loved one, or in the case of the medical profession a patient – the more likely will be a ‘good death’ instead of a lonely and impersonal passing.

Currently just a small dot on the radar is the ‘soul midwives‘ movement which is a voluntary group of women who want to give spiritual, physical and existential comfort to the dying.  It will be interesting to see if this becomes a growing movement or whether friends and family will be able to administer the same kind of holistic end of life care.

Co-operative Funeralcare’s use of an industry trends survey to place the brand as ‘thought leader’ in their industry is a well worn marketing device.

But the survey doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know, and in reality highlights the Co-op’s attempt to catch up.  In short the survey of 2000 people and 850 of its funeral companies confirms that more people now want a celebration of their life, colourful events, secular songs, bespoke coffins, green funerals and personal input from mourners.

The Co-op have involved the country’s leading funeral historian, Dr Julian Litten, to opine that the funerals of Princess Diana and Jade Goody have changed the public’s view of how funerals can be delivered.

I think Dr Litten is wrong about this.  The British public can decide for themselves that a religious ritual isn’t appropriate for someone who had no religious beliefs and that as paying customers they will have the send off they want rather than a ‘choose one from three options’ offered by many funeral directors.

Similarly, there wasn’t much that was environmentally friendly about Princess Di’s and Jade Goody’s funerals, yet the demand for green funerals has risen hugely in the last 15 years as people become more concerned about the environmentally damaging aspects of traditional funerals.

No, organisations like the Co-operative Funeralcare have been slow to understand the change in demand whereas innovators such as My Last Song, One Life ceremonies, the green burial movement, suppliers of bespoke coffins and authors of guides such as The Good Funeral Guide have understood the requirements of the now ageing baby boomers and are meeting their needs.

The number of humanist officiants is increasing to meet the demands of atheists for humanist funerals, and I would like to commend the effort put in by one in particular, Simon Allen, who’s contribution to My Last Song has been invaluable.

The funeral industry is on the verge of a big change in how it operates, and this change is driven by consumer demand. Funeral directors are, inevitably, traditional and slow to change although there are notable exceptions.

But they must recognise that many new customers will be from the generation who, when in their teens redefined youth culture. During the next years of their lives they expected to get what they wanted and that’s going to be true for how their end of life (or their older relatives)  is treated.

The one statistic that is still disappointing if not surprising is that 55 per cent of respondents hadn’t discussed their funerals with family and friends.  Death and funerals are still taboo subjects, but the trend I suspect is for this to be reducing, helped by the growing number of online sources of support and information.

I will again plug the Lifebox facility of My Last Song which encourages and enables people to plan their own bespoke funeral event and store those plans and wishes safely for their loved ones to access.  In practice filling in the funeral wishes checklist and the individual death plan will mean discussing the options with close family members.

When death and funerals are more commonly discussed, the numbers of celebratory, colourful and individual ceremonies requested will increase…whether the larger traditional funeral companies are well placed to deliver them efficiently is questionable.

It’s great news that two UK based websites My Last Song and The Good Funeral Guide have been selected as the world’s top funeral websites by US guru Brian Burkhardt, also known as ‘YourFuneralGuy’.

I must say I was surprised when Google Alerts, true to its name, alerted me to the fact that My Last Song was the number one funeral website slot.

In the past two years there’s been a big increase in the number of funeral and bereavement websites and blogs, particularly in the US, so for My Last Song to be chosen as the best funeral website in the world by an American funeral expert is quite an honour.

Second placed website, The Good Funeral Guide, was started in 2009 by Charles Cowling, author of the Guide.

Charles, who is at the centre of the new-era funeral blogging and tweeting community, confirms the growing trend for online funeral information. “There’s a lot of global ideas-swapping around the topic of evolving funeral customs, especially in the English speaking world.”

It seems likely that the growing interest in end of life websites is because the baby boomer generation is now facing their mortality. As Charles puts it: “These are the people who reinvented youth culture. Just watch them reinvent death culture.”

This generation will want their funerals to reflect their views and lifestyles instead of the often dreary traditional event, built around a religious ritual out of place in an increasingly secular 21st century.

Another reason for the increased use of funeral planning and funeral information websites is the desire to save money.

Funeral costs are rising fast, and the customer is often getting a bad deal because the funeral industry knows they are dealing with people unable or unwilling to discuss money when organising a loved one’s funeral.

As Charles Cowling says, “There are many ways of saving money when planning a funeral and negotiating with the funeral directors. The Good Funeral Guide and My Last Song have lots of advice on how to save money and also have a better, more appropriate funeral.”

A number of organisations wanting to change how funerals are handled have formed a loose alliance called the Farewell Innovators. These include a photographer specialising in funeral photography and a company producing bespoke memorial books of photographs.

Also involved are those who offer eco-friendly funerals and a more personal, often more celebratory approach, to the final goodbye.

All use the new technology so I hope that next year, these new companies feature in lists of the top websites.

Earlier this week I visited one of the big funeral companies to discuss a possible advertising deal on My Last Song.

The funeral planning advice articles on the website are increasingly popular and thus valuable to a company with a lot of funeral businesses around the country.

The discussion got off to a good start and my proposal seemed to be acceptable.

And then the managing director showed me the print off of the article called Cutting Funeral Costs.

“If we advertise on your website you’ll have to take off this page,” he said.

“Why?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“Because it means my companies won’t be making as much money. I don’t want families to pay less for a funeral.”

In fairness, he said that he didn’t have targets for his funeral businesses and his funeral directors were told not to force up the price the families wanted to pay.

He said advice on costs was discussed with the family, to ensure that “mum had the funeral they would want her to have…”

He didn’t think visitors to My Last Song needed to know how they could reduce the costs of the funeral so the deal would only be done if the advice was removed.

I thanked him for seeing me and caught the next train back to London.

The company, which has a large market share, should be aware that the industry will change radically in the next few years.  Customers will be better informed and new businesses will challenge the established way of selling funeral services.

Take coffins. Eco-friendly materials are becoming increasingly popular, and while funeral directors are making these choices available, companies such as Greenfield Creations in Essex and The Coffin Company soon to launch in the north east, sell direct to customers wanting cheaper and more sustainable coffins.

And flowers. Funeral flowers are extremely expensive and also bad for the environment as they require heat and artificial light. Yes, the tradition of marking a death with flowers goes back thousands of years but that doesn’t mean a family in the 21st century shouldn’t want to save on this part of the funeral package, or instead donate the money to a good cause.

I appreciate the point made by the managing director that a family ‘at grief’ need a sympathetic service rather than a ‘we can do a great cut price job for your mum’ approach.

But what is unacceptable is his view that the customer should not be given the information to be a more informed client before the ‘at need’ engagement with the funeral director.

Only in a business as ‘traditional’ as the funeral business could such an unfair approach to the customer be defended in 2010.

With more businesses and organisations wanting to change how we deal with death, dying and funerals, this approach won’t last much longer, I hope.

Social networking is a great thing.  Thanks to social networker extrordinaire Charles Cowling, I came across lots of US websites and blogs that occupy the funeral, mourning and end of life space.

I got in touch to bring My Last Song to their attention and before long, YourFuneralGuy, had put My Last Song at the top of the list of funeral websites for 2010, with The Good Funeral Guide, author Charles Cowling, ‘in at number two’.

Someone then commented that My Last Song was the best funeral website in the world because it had the facility for people to put their wishes in the Lifebox for loved ones to fulfil (though I can’t find this comment).

Another US fellow traveller is Gail Rubin, whose Family Plot blog is excellent, as is the Modern Mourner, the website of Shirley Tatum.

Shirley has sent My Last Song her five favourite farewell tracks, and splendid songs for a funeral they are too.

There is no doubting that funeral music is of great interest…many visitors to My Last Song look for funeral hymns, secular funeral music, advice on classical music suitable for funerals and the five farewell tracks that now more than 70 people have contributed.

There is also no doubt that websites that advise people on how to get good value from their funeral director (or funeral  home as they’re called in the US), how to have the most appropriate send off, how to address their final days and then how to come to terms with the loss will get more and more traffic as the populations of the UK and the US get older.

The people within this demographic, 60 onwards, will also be increasingly those who are from the baby boomer generation, defined by the US Census Bureau as born between 1946 and 1964. These are people who will redefine aging and the end of life experience as they redefined youth culture back in the 60’s.

They are internet savvy. They use social media. They get information from websites.  Many will want to leave this world in a style that is unique and celebratory.

In the UK, a number of organisations who cater for this market have grouped together under the title of Farewell Innovators. A Facebook page has been created and a first meeting is being organised.

I would expect a similar informal association to exist, or to be set up fairly soon, in the US, and then for the farewell innovators both sides of the Atlantic to swap notes, opinions and be mutually supportive.

There’s a lot of people out there who need what we are offering them…the understanding that death is part of life, that it should be planned for, that as we are unique in life so our partings should acknowledge and celebrate our individuality, and that our parting, while a sad and mournful experience for our loved ones, should enable them to continue with their lives stronger in the knowledge that we have had the ending we wished for.

And I hope that includes playing their last songs, music that is meaningful and memorable.