And songs will be sung in the park by us the young

In my last blog I slated the music industry for turning into a dreary money-making machine. This is the reason that Dirty Pretty Things split up. They were making music because they wanted to, not because they were getting paid well for it. They said the music industry was becoming more 'business like' and I must agree.
I have spent the last week embracing the last dregs of good music. The Spinto Band. The Futureheads. McFly. All band's recent efforts are brilliant and, especially in the case of The Spinto Band and The Futureheads, these are bands that have to work hard to get where they want to be. And this is a big middle-finger to the music industry. The Futureheads new album opened with the lyrics
It's time to wake up
It's time to change
Let's get it started
I feel like there's so much to rearrange
The Beginning Of The Twist symbolises a new start or era; the path taken by The Futureheads was one where they decided to travel the road on their own. Track two on the album, Walking Backwards, tells the story of how the record company tried to stop them being the band they wanted to be. The video shows the bands as puppets to explain that the record company was trying to make them do what was needed to make them more 'corporate'. When their contract with 679 expired in November 2006 they decided not to re-sign but to become what they wanted, on their own.
McFly left Universal Records after their contract ended. This move, and the starting of their own label Super Records, was highly publicised because this was quite a strange career move for a band like McFly having had the success they have had. The reason they decided to go alone was similar to The Futureheads and that being they wanted everything to be directly from them to the fans; the decisions and the music being the main examples. They wanted to make releases with no middle man telling them what to and what not to release.
The Spinto Band release music through their own imprint 'Spintonic', under Virgin Records. They have released two albums mainstream, Nice And Nicely Done (2006) and Moonwink (2008) although they released 4 albums before them, the first of which was released under the name of Free Beer. This is another band who aren't making music for money but just for the purpose of making music.
“It’s just really fun to play shows to people who care about your band. And that’s what I look forward to. There’s people out there who we’ve made impacts in their lives like all the musicians who made impacts in our lives. And there aren’t too many jobs we could have that we could say that.”

It is coming to the year of the Ox... which sounds prospective in the case of underground music. The Ox is a symbol of working hard and being patient, rarely driven by the prospect of financial gain. These people aren't playing music for money, but for the sake of music's sake.