At one time, "major label" meant something specific and well-understood. At the end of the 1980s, the majors included Columbia/Sony, WEA (Warner Brothers, Electra, Atlantic), Universal, EMI (an English corporation), BMG (part of a German conglomerate) and Polygram.
The major label histories written by Gary Marmorstein and Frederic Dannen (see Resources) have common themes of excess that pervaded the industry in its heyday. These accounts help to explain why the majors did so little to adapt their businesses to the Internet while they still could; they felt invincible. When the business changed as Internet file-sharing began, major-label executives, instead of adapting, generally resisted, and their legal departments began a humiliating series of suits, often unsuccessful, against file-sharing teenagers.
By 2005, Polygram had disappeared into BMG, which then merged with Sony. EMI flirted (and still flirts) with bankruptcy. Warner Bros. cut back both artist signings and distribution deals with independents. Owen Husney (who arranged Prince's original contract with Warner) noted in an interview on the Artists House Music website that an artist's first contract with a major label that once might have included a $250,000 advance might now net a $5,000 or $10,000 advance.
While major-label retrenchment over the decade hurt large independents like Motown that relied on major-label distribution, a new era of independent distribution began. New small labels, some of them beginning as a single record store and run by a new generation of Internet-savvy entrepreneurs, have flourished. Through "viral" marketing they soon began creating hits out of proportion to their distribution. For example, Domino record's first new hit act, Franz Ferdinand, sold more than 75,000 copies in its first week of release.
The past decade has seen a growing number of artists at every level who have bypassed traditional distribution entirely to pay for and manage their own distribution. While the numbers--the velocity of full-price copies sold--haven't often been high enough to make an alliance with these artists attractive to majors, independents have quickly seen opportunities. They entered into various nontraditional business alliances with them, to the benefit of both artists and independents.