The local indie acts do fine where I live. They all rent a place together and work at coffee shops or, longshoremen some of them because they can take off whene

The local indie acts do fine where I live. They all rent a place together and work at coffee shops or, longshoremen some of them because they can take off whenever they want to. I know plenty of bands like Hooded Fang, Gold & Youth, and Lightning Dust that do fine for themselves without major labels and are able to tour worldwide and still come back with money. The big acts now are really, really big. Jay-Z, Timberlake, U2 they're all approaching billionaire status. Just there are less middle men siphoning it off to feed the 'industry'. The old music industry was a closed club you couldn't get into but now anybody can be in a band and get exposure or record cheaply. If the music biz is so dire, why is there an explosion in small recording studios. They are all booked solid too one of my friends had to go out of the city to record because the 23 studios (there used to be only 4) were booked including the night shift well into next year. The punk bands def make more money now. They can actually afford to tour instead of stealing all their equipment like in the old days and pushing a broken down VW across the country and nearly starving to death in the middle of nowhere Arizona. Now they can fly to Brazil, or do shows in Iceland. That never happened a decade ago. These are local tiny acts without labels too. There is also ~40 live venues where I live now. 15yrs ago there were only 2 legal venues for smaller acts, and everybody else had to illegally play in warehouses and hope the police didn't show up. Even worse, some music industry A&R parasite was in charge of one of the clubs and refused plenty of acts that went on to be successful here because he didn't like them, or thought they wouldn't be good for business. I'm glad the industry is dead. Let it die. We've never had so much music