The days of renown music artists having million seller albums are fast becoming history. Traditional music programmes which highlighted an assortment of music styles such as  Top Of The Pops are long since gone, satellite T.V. channels struggle to attract large audiences possibly down to showcasing benign rubbish most of the day with too many distracting adverts interrupting programmes too frequently.

The recorded music industry is struggling in the early stages of a transition to digital formats, such as MP3, from the dominant CD format. CD sales are declining faster than industry executives and analysts have expected.
Digital music sales are currently dominated by Apple’s iTunes Store, which by some estimates has more than 70 percent of the market.

But what is the future of music?

Amongst all this uncertainty one music format remains popular, new bands have started releasing one off singles and promotional collectors releases on 7″ 45 rpm vinyl. The dance music industry still uses vinyl as a reliable format and the current trend in funk 45 reissues help to keep turntable manufacturers from the bread line but even this is a tiny fraction of even 15 years ago.

Although record sales may be down the interest in new music is as strong as ever, there are more music festivals in the UK than ever before with more and  more sell out gigs across UK cities. Myspace attracts thousands of music fans hunting down their favourite band with new musicians finding fame purely through the site.
A new movement called “Space Disco” or “Cosmic House” is being spearheaded by New York-based label ‘Whatever We Want Records’. Funk music is reinventing itself with new bands finding cult followings and strange new music genres such as fidget (a form of house) are emerging.

So why are people reporting the death of music?

Possibly the main reason that there is talk of the music scene dieing is because the major record labels who previously controlled the ebb and flow of music streams across the world have finally lost control of these fast mutating music genres, they simply do not know what is going on, how to control it but more importantly… how to make money from it! Bands have always found it hard to make money from record deals, the advances in music technology now means that if a band can record their tracks in a rehearsal studio, they can then self produce their songs on a computer with relative ease, it then costs around £500 to release 500 7″ records or they can just create their own art work and burn off CD’s from their p.c. to sell on Myspace or at gigs.

DIY currently seems to be the future for music…