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The future of the struggling music industry.

The music industry is at once at it's greatest day ever and at it's worst day. What do I mean by this? The industry has been transforming in the past few years in most part due to the explosion of the internet and the popularity of sites such as Purevolume and MySpace. There was once a day when a band had to get signed to a major label in order to become famous, wealthy, and truly successful. Getting signed was the ultimate goal of most bands, because after all once a band got signed they immediately received large sums of money and no longer had to worry about all the technical things in getting a band known such as promotion, cd pressing, merchandise, and so forth.

Getting signed by a major label was at one time very hard, then it become easier as labels looked more and more for the quick buck product. But this system of signing as many mediocre bands (and some good ones) began to fail the industry in that more and more technology allowed for greater access to music, new bands, and a way to bypass the record labels who in reality were nothing more then middlemen taking large chunks of money off of things they never created in the first place.

Bands that sought the easy life of a signed band began to see trouble as well while bands that had passion and a desire to bring their music to the masses for the love of music began to succeed in ways never before thought possible by unsigned acts. The industry was quick to blame file-sharing as the cause of the downward spiral, but in reality that was just an excuse to cover the fact that record labels realized that they were becoming less and less needed by musicians, consumers, and even retailers.

When sites like Purevolume and MySpace hit the scene, all bets were off that the major labels could actually recover from their downward spiral. Now bands and even other kinds of entertainers could reach a global audience without spending a penny and without any label help at all. DIY (Do It Yourself) companies for merchandise, cds, and promotions became ever more needed by these bands and a whole new industry emerged out of the collapsing old industry. The old system allowed major labels to literally dictate the music one heard and one could purchase, bands were even molded by some labels to their liking because after all once a band was signed, the band was owned by the label and at the whim of the label's desires.

Nowadays bands can gain a worldwide audience through MySpace, sell

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