There's going to be a LOT of "wheezing balloons" this decade. The music era we live in is unprecedented. There's a ton of bands in different genres all fighting for the small pie known as people who buy music. Without album sales able to gauge the interest in artists, and the huge tours becoming extinct, everything is upside down. You have huge bands like VR having low sales and little media interest, and artists like MIA getting tons of media attention yet very little record sales. Top sellers are Disney fads and other flavor of the month shit selling a max of 2 or 3 million copies. In 2007 and beyond, you can enter the Billboard top 20 by selling 10,000 copies. Thats insane. At that rate, no band can ever become dominant because they are always being pushed down the totem pole by the next artist to sell ten thousand albums. Its bizarre.

The days of Joe Public walking into a record store and buying several cds are long gone. You are lucky if you can even pay Joe Public to go within a mile of a record store, and if he does, he'll buy one album and its likely something he liked in his youth.

Also, the days of people sitting around talking about the hot new band are over as well. There's too many bands out there for a specific band/artist to gain a real buzz.

The industry is in chaos.