&gt; If anything labels are more important than ever and music sales are driven by the kind of marketing campaigns that only big records labels can afford.<p>That&#x27;s just not true. While the very few artists that do sell albums nowadays (Taylor Swift, Adele, Kanye West, etc.) are on major labels and do have promotion from major labels, these artists are also already successful enough to have done their own promotion if they wanted to.<p>On top of that, these successful artists by todays standards are selling what would have been considered disappointing numbers for artists at their levels 20 years ago. In the 90s Hootie and the Blowfish (an act with no staying power) sold 16 million albums in the US. By comparison Adele&#x27;s 25 which is a huge hit by today&#x27;s standards has only sold 3 million copies in the US (though 16 million worldwide.) In the 90s many albums sold tens of millions of copies, nobody does that any more.<p>Bowie was 100% right.