If you are about to take time to read the words I am rattling off on my shiny Mac keyboard, there is a good chance you fall into one of three categories of people. You’re likely someone who grew up in a past generation, having spent your formative years during a period when pop music was actually the good stuff, the very glue of youth culture. Alternatively, you might be someone whose youth landed somewhere in the period of the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, thoroughly unsatisfied by the various fads that found their way into the mainstream, and subsequently over that period found yourself looking for an alternative. Lastly, you may be a music fan who came into things in the post-Napster era, and are only mildly aware of a mainstream at all anymore because you don’t need a radio station to tell you what to listen to.

The common thread that binds those of us who span those generations is the music, the soundtrack to our lives. And there’s a decent chance that most of us have a healthy respect for the music adored by those in generations not our own. Where we differ dramatically, however, is how we all discovered and acquired those works of art that so helped shape our everyday lives. The companies that were the original entities who produced and made available music since the phenomenon of popular culture are still around, but they are failing miserably and no longer seem relevant to those of us, well… those of us likely to read this column.

Many people from the earlier generations could often just listen to the radio to find solid rock ‘n’ roll, and even for those on the hipper side of the fence there existed a large and hardly secretive counterculture that was prone to gathering at large music festivals where underground community thrived. Those from the middle generations grew up skeptical, battered by disco, put off by Reagan, and possibly driven insane by what new wave was shaped into by the mainstream. Driven to college radio and hanging out in local record stores, you likely found yourself eagerly awaiting EPs and LPs ordered from distant towns to show up in the mailbox, the feeling of opening each sleeve an indescribable sensation. For those of us who remain consummate seekers of music in a post-Napster world we have to only look to that magical network of fiber-optic cable that leads us to Blogland. We almost never purchase music, and if we do, we increasingly expect neat little files to be delivered to our desktops.

Across the recording industry, record sales have been falling over the last several years. In 2007 alone sales were down 17 percent. What should a label that looks to bring good new music into the collective consciousness look like in the future, given the rapid decline in the recording industry’s main revenue stream? The big record companies are likely to always be around. Even many of the more successful labels outside of the Big Four still rely on their bigger counterparts for distribution. Then there are the big independents. But what is the future of the little startup label? No longer are 18-year-olds with disposable income sending off for copies of the small run EPs that sustained the smallest labels in the past.

There has been a noticeable shift in the way the biggest labels are trying to run their business. They have increasingly turned to other revenue streams aside from album sales. In an unusual opening of the accounting books by the British Phonographic Industry the UK’s Financial Times reports: “The BPI, a UK trade body, said that 11.4 percent of record labels’ revenues came from areas such as copyright licensing, merchandise, and sponsorship deals.” In the shift away from focusing on record sales, the record labels have slashed their A&R departments, which are responsible for finding and developing new acts.

I see in this a new role for small labels of the future. Like the 50-year-old Island Records, which was the most successful independent record label in history before its sale to PolyGram in 1989, these smaller labels could help reshape the industry in a rapidly changing time, while making the musical world a better place.