Although sites like bandcamp, facebook and myspace have made it possible to reach global audiences, with such massive saturation, it can sometimes be impossible to break through, and unless you are particularly savvy when it comes to marketing yourself, it is unlikely that you will never make it past your friends and family.

The best way then, to establish yourselves in today’s music scene seems to be through the “troubadour” technique – to play as many shows as possible, whenever and wherever you can, until people start to take notice.

These shows are a great way of getting your music out to people and so it becomes helpful to have your own CD to sell after shows. Here you have a couple of options depending on the sort of scale you want to operate on; CD replication is great for large quantities whereas CD duplication can be used for smaller orders, generally of 500 or less. This can be very simple and cost effective to do, and will mean that you could potentially gain a wider audience.

Not only this, but having your own product to sell or give away on the night will also make you look more professional than you would by producing a handful of links to people, and will also be particularly helpful if there happens to be a label representative or music journalist in the crowd who can take your CD off to review.

Perhaps one big change that has taken place in recent years is the way music has accepted and utilised the internet to its advantage. There has clearly been a problem since the net took off with people obtaining music illegally, so the music industry has tackled this by allowing legal downloads of songs, with small charges for those who only want to download a single track.

Before the internet, the biggest revolution was perhaps in the form of CDs, when the digital age replaced the analogue age. Before CDs, the world obtained music in the form of tapes or vinyl records.

It’s not just the formats that are changing. Genres and bands themselves are constantly shifting and public opinion on what constitutes ‘good’ music is always differing over the decades. It shows that as time progresses, music goes with it and it is the main reason it is one of the most important art forms in the world.