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“I spend all my time on the internet, one way or the other” says Todd West, “And I don’t trade bands from the music media mafia via p2p, but hell yes I trade my own music as an indie artist, and if I’m promoting other indie bands and labels and they have a commercial or a song to promote, I’ll thrown them into my shared folder.”

West does the Underground Music Chart Top 100, webzines, and most of the content at Underground Records (http://undergroundrecords.org), which is a direct response to big money and media market saturation of traditional music industry tactics.

“Look, more indie music is traded than all that mass produced shit with a marketing budget. It’s just that is what you see on MTV and in magazines, and for sure on the mafia owned radio. So even though it’s the major owned product getting ripped that you hear about in the media, the underground, with legitimate indie bands and labels trading music, rules P2P.

According to West, turning that into a viable “market” for indie music, has nothing to do with selling “product”.

“If I had to make money in this, I’d have to compete in the mainstream media and press, and that is such a racket only big pockets can play. Plus, myself like a lot of independent creators, are not business people and we’re so outside the mass market vein, it’s not at all easy to get industry people after they have become addicted to the formula of selling “products” and making x amount, to even pay attention to us. So file trading and other means of digital distribution allows us to at least offer our music to everyone, whether some fat cat likes it or not.”

One of the newer ways to promote independent music via p2p is the use of commericals embedded into multimedia. There are many ways to do this, from using mp3’s in a clip utilizing voice over, a standard radio procedure from day one, to producing alternative media such as flash clips or quicktime movies, which can now be reasonably produced cheaply, to promote the artist or label catalog using downloadable networks.

“File trading will never die, it will just go openly underground, where what you get is real creative talent, new ideas and new artists. I’m all for people protecting their content, and to massively download or share someone’s music if they don’t want it to be, yeah that’s stealing. Still, that is what police and the courts are for. It won’t be long until the largest file trading network will be a legitimate p2p program, and the only music there will be artists and content producers who want their material there, it will be a real underground, and by that I don’t mean illegal, I mean a real alternative to the music mafia, and it will have more great material than any corporation, or gonglomerate of corporations, and it will dominate the music industry. May take another ten years, but it is coming, mark my word.”

A vast majority interviewed for this article in the music industry agree, the black hat illegal underground isn’t going to disappear either. While the lawyers and police stay busy trying to catch pirates of major industry content, the networks and methods where that occurs are now becoming encrypted and it is possible to actually mask traffic as one type and it actually be another. The resources and means to completely shut down illegal file trading are so vast, it is a guarantee there will always be illegal file trading networks.

And all the while those spring up and shut down, the advance of the thousands of bands in the underground continue to eat away at the majors market share.

“Years ago I tried and tried to get some major player to invest and us build the first legitimate online distribution network, something similar to a branded napster or kazaa, but where we could control the content, so that a label or band could add their own stuff, but we could stop content that wasn’t licensed, or that we couldn’t conference and approve of with the actual owners. It never happened, myself and hundreds like me who tried to get a major label or distribution company to build such a system were completely ignored. Well, p2p came anyway, but in a different set of circumstances, and now you have like all these online stores like itunes….great, but the final picture will be all these labels with stores like itunes, integrated into a system where even totally unknown indie artists can hook their networks into the servers, like it’s done kinda on p2p, or even host content for the indies where whomever develops the software, which would be like a p2p software distro, not like an online store….when that happens, the domination of the old school music industry will be complete, and the underground shall rule.”

Now it’s up to the software developers, but for sure, the next few years will not see a loss of downloaders, rather a switch from pirated to legit promotion of unsigned and independent artists and labels.

“That kind of traffic is the majority of traffic on p2p music sharing networks now anyway” says West, “It’s not pirated material if you leave out the pirated software and porn going accross those networks, it is independent artists sharing their files and checking out files and music from other indies. No one realizes this, because all the media scream is either lawsuits, porn or pirates, and that is because there is a media mafia of only a few players. The internet is taking longer than some, including myself, thought it would to change that. P2P though, is another network, no, set of networks, that is helping to give choice when broadcast media owners and so many labels and distributorships are failing or combining. It is keeping new music, media and content, alive.”