SXSW

South by Southwest music festival is the event in the music industry. Here's a short article from the Times covering the event and its metamorphosis into a large music industry networking event (perhaps in some ways eclipsing its status as a musical/cultural event). I just had a friend return from SXSW and some of the bands he noted as really mind-blowing were:

Illinois (mentioned in the article)
the Lemurs
La Mita
AM Syndicate

Key Quote:
- If the festival has an overall message, it’s that musicians need to build their own support systems and hustle for themselves.

Ultimately, I think this idea dovetails nicely with the concept of "The Long Tail". I'm not going to get into it here, but check out the wikipedia article and resulting links. More and more, economic (and cultural) activity will focus on filling and marketing to niches, with much of this activity undertaken by individual entrepreneurs (or in this case, musicians).