From music downloads to video and picture editing and sharing, a new concept of circular entertainment has emerged. Personal videos are taken on phones and passed around with people adding their home made music and music downloads to it as well as pictures. Eventually, the finished product will come full circle within a group of friends.



This has caused more and more demand for original entertainment and music, other than just what is put out there by the powers that be from the music industry.

And original music is very much at the fingertips of anyone that wants it nowadays. Internet sites have been set up to enable potential musicians to get there music into the public domain with relative ease.

Find a good site, upload your own music, add mailing lists and message boards and also provide a medium for selling your CD's. Success can also be monitored by keeping a track of how many people are visiting your site.

Choose the right site and it will have a publishing company attached with a music editor who will listen to all uploaded music and pick out the best for featuring.

You can help your chances by regularly emailing the editor asking to be featured and also by constantly providing new music. Some of these publishing companies will do their best to get your music used in soundtracks and commercials. Record deals are also a possibility although their success in this area has been limited.

Copyright is not really an issue. While you're waiting to be discovered, the more people that hear your music, the better chance you have. If you are signed by a record label they will then look after your copyright issues but until then safeguard yourself by encoding your contact details into your Mp3 music so it can be traced back to you.

Long gone are the days of sending demo tapes into record producers in the vain hope that they would listen to them. The onus is now very much on the maker of the music to get him/herself heard. Control over your own musical destiny is a good thing. Even negative feedback will tell you where you are going wrong so the appropriate adjustments can be made.

So, how do music producers feel about this turn away from tangible music to cyber music sales? Unable to fight it, they have cashed in on it themselves. Music download sales totalled $300 million last year. That's three times the success of 2003.

The difficulty in the beginning was the pirate downloads that people were accessing for free - effectively stealing the music. Download prices were set at 65c per song from the US but reports state this price was set artificially low to stimulate demand.

It has had the effect of encouraging ever more people to carry out music downloads from reputable sites, and to pay for this privilege, which is a good thing.

However, now demand has reached such a level, music executives are now making noises about pushing the price up. This, they say, is due to demand. However, the general consensus is that it will push people back into piracy.

The top record labels have declined to comment on the price increase debate.