It has been a tough year for the music business and all who are involved including artists, managers, lawyers and label execs and employees.

Matt McDonald, vice president of CMJ, said the attendance was high this year but the outlook for next year is less certain. Martin Mills, chairman of Beggars Group record company says, “We’re doing great this year, but it’s been an ongoing struggle for our industry. We’ve been hurting for awhile. Now the whole world is experiencing that”. The recent post How Quickly Is The Music Industry Shrinking? tells us that 2008 should be as bad as 2007.

Illegal downloading, hundreds of thousands of music releases, and market fragmentation (the loss of reaching a large, stable audience of potential customers through print, radio, and television ads) has still left the music industry along with other industries in utter chaos.

Now the world is faced with a global economic crisis. “You were paying $1.80 a gallon and suddenly it’s $3.80,” said Bhowmik. “The cover charges haven’t gone up. The concept that you’re going to be the next Nirvana is a nice idea, but most musicians almost just do it to have their art out there.” “You get offered a scoring job on television, but they want to pay very little or nothing because they think you should be grateful for the publicity,” said Shonali Bhowmik of New York-based Tigers and Monkeys.

More importantly, artists today are not as viable as artists of yesterday. Sure a couple of artists breakthrough here and there, but the magnitude of works available in the market place are over looked by the majority of consumers. Whether the music industry will return to its heyday is certainly unknown, but many people still hope so.