"The record industry has come back, bigger and better than ever. …It has been on the verge of disaster… but each time sobbing requiems were premature." It sounds like something someone could have written in 1983 or the early 1970s, or even last week, but actually it comes from a New York Times article circa 1942. People have predicted the death of the record business since its formation. And it's been true every time. The music business consistently demonstrates resilience of Mr. Bill or Gumby – you can crush it, reshape it, twist it, but somehow it always manages to survive, largely due to one truism: music is not going away. People will always want music, and they will get it, whether it involves commerce or not.

The record business is not the music business. People made money with music thousands of years before Edison conceived of storing sound, and will continue to make money with music thousands of years hence, until the concept of money itself becomes quaint (come the grand and glorious revolution). And considerably more will make music just for the sheer pleasure of it, as they've done pretty much since humankind could call itself that. It bears repeating: music is one of the hallmarks of humanity.

I suspect, however, that until the revolution comes and money becomes irrelevant, people will continue earning money by making and marketing music, one way or another. In the short term, this will require making music better or marketing oneself better or just, for whatever reason, being more appealing to a wider audience. The good news for musicians and audiences is that the potential for more people to make a living appealing to their own niche is greater now than at any time before. Thanks largely to the rise of communications technologies that allow instant access to information from anywhere on the planet, we grow closer and closer to Marshall McLuhan's "global village" with every passing day. Musicians and marketing people are beginning to use these resources to reach their audiences, thinking locally, but also thinking globally. With over six billion people on the planet, finding 60,000 or 600,000 or even six million who like a particular sound shouldn't be that hard. However, as the technology exists today, audiences still have to meet them halfway.

This is a problem, as audiences have become spoiled. In this era of fast food, instant access, and media on demand, people have gotten used to having music dropped into their lap by radio, MTV, friend's recommendations, etc. Musicians and marketers need to figure out ways to painlessly bring the music to this audience that don't involve the traditional mass methods of dissemination that have simply stopped working efficiently. The process has already begun, and I expect it to snowball as more and more people invent newer and better methods for getting music to the people who need to hear it.

A music business commentator explains; more years ago than I care to think about, my buddy and colleague Dave Sprague told me that rock was dead in the same sense that jazz was dead: both have broken off into offshoots and mutations. It's all a bunch of hybrid styles or substyles – punk rock, emo, jam band rock, electronica rock, death metal, heavy metal, hard rock, folk rock, Lilith rock, etc., etc., ad nauseum. In the process, the focus and the music may have improved, but the artists creating it have limited their audiences. You can't generally consider it a mass media anymore, because there's neither a monolithic jazz audience nor a monolithic rock audience anymore. It's part of the process of the music developing, of feeling itself as an art rather than a product. Being better than everything else on the charts doesn't matter when it comes to art. The charts deal in commerce, not quality. They don't measure what sounds the best (as if such a thing were possible), but what sells the best.

So, as I stated in the introduction, probably more great music – music that you will like – is available today than at any other time. Surely something released among the over 60,000 albums that came out the year before I wrote this will appeal to you, even if you're just one of 50 or 100 people who appreciate it. The difference between now and a quarter century ago is that now the audience has to find the scent, hunt for it, and perhaps even dig a bit. Unfortunately, a business geared around selling millions of a thing to make a profit requires that the thing be easily accessible.

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