The music industry is working hard to make sure that the local
bands get just far enough to keep new bands appearing but not
to interfere with their product.

Their product:

The music industry's product is not music but CD's with data on
them.  They have a number of other products that all involve the
vague concept of Intellectual property (They call it IP).  Intellectual
property is one of those terms like Military intelligence.  The
words are always found combined since they have no meaning or truth
by them selves.


Promotion of Crap Bands:

The Music industry is having problem with their modern bands.  it
turns out that the new bands just don't have the staying power of
many older bands.  In fact the sales of 20 year old Rock and Roll
does better per year than most new top 40 songs.

How much new music Can they Deal with.

The music industry's product is CD's.  These have to be produced
and delivered to stores where the customers can trade them for
money.  It turns out that a careful evaluation of the logistics
behind their business and it becomes clear that that only so much
music can be delivered to the local record shops and that results
in a situation where the major labels only need about acceptable
3 new songs per week.  Most of their artists are already under
contracts to provide that and the result is the music industry has
no need for new material.

We can run the numbers to find out just how many new
songs are needed.

According to the Billboard top 200 albums for Jan 12 2002...
looking at the top 40 albums 
we find there are 35 new albums that have been on the chart for
less than 26 weeks.  We find an 2 that have been there less than a year
and 3 that have been there more than a year.

Since many stores only want to stock the top 40, we end up needing
35 albums every 26 weeks or 70 originally new albums per year.
Melbourne Australia alone has over three
thousand bands.  


The conclusion of this is that its not hopeful for most bands to
make it big or even break even if you go with the old way of
doing things.  Now that a band can put together a decent CD at low
cost and use the net to get the music out, there is a chance they
can make decent money by making music.  For most bands, thats good
enough.