It will be a good year for the bank managers and accountants who work with Oasis. A new album is due from the brothers grim and their current hired guns in May, an album which will conclude the terms of their current contract with Sony. That's when the fun begins.

You can safely assume that Oasis manager Marcus Russell is currently receiving many calls from record company bigwigs eager to be his new best mate. Despite their creative stupor of late, Oasis are still good for a few million sales with every new release, hence the indecent haste to get the Gallagher scrawls on a new, legally binding document.

However, by the time the next Oasis contract renewal is due, expect to see Vodafone or O2 jostling with EMI and V2 for bands' signatures. By then, sussed managers may be happier to take calls from telecoms, especially given their experiences with the record industry.

That's just one possibility for music business observers to mull over. The record industry is in a considerable state of flux and so absolutely everything is up for grabs again. If it's not consolidation and mergers which are causing unease, it's developments such as the move to digital platforms or the arrival of the 50 quid men which are forcing stick-in-the-mud labels and companies to grapple with new business models.

But while the major label-focused record industry doesn't know if it's coming or going, it's clover-time for everyone else. Change is always good and the current spate of transformations are tidings of great joy for smart bands, clued-in independent labels and those industry folk who haven't spent the last 10 years ignoring the barbarians at the gate.

After all, people are still going to gigs, people continue to buy music in large amounts (see the pre-Christmas queues at any record store near you) and people can't stop downloading tunes. Hey, what's not to like?

The biggest change has already occurred, and it's knocked the fabled "record deal" for six. Once, the record deal was the be-all and end-all of a band's existence, the arrival of some wideboy A&R scout at your third gig in the Baggot Inn promising to turn you into "the next U2" at the drop of a hat. The perception back then was that you had to have one of these deals in order to make, produce and distribute records.

In 2005, the reality is you can do all of this using a computer, various pieces of music-making software, a CD burner and diligent use of Google. It makes signing a contract which binds you to a faceless corporation for five albums (or until the guy who signed you leaves and you're dropped) appear neither attractive nor sensible.

While you could argue that a record label provides the euros necessary for marketing and promotion, an in-depth, cost-benefit analysis of this spend might show it's not necessarily a long-term advantage. After all, a band who are gigging and attracting an audience are already doing their own marketing. No wonder, then, that live revenue has become so important to an act's budget - and gig marketing is one of the main reasons behind the current ascendancy of (albeit dreadful) singer-songwriters in Ireland.

Signing and developing new acts is an expensive business, which is why risk-averse major labels, seeing that the latest pop bubble is beginning to burst, will become catalogue pimps. This is where the telecoms and other traditionally non-music business sectors will come into play. Requiring content of one sort or another to sell phones and services, telecoms will introduce a new breed of deals where, for example, Coldplay might sell ringtones to 02 and do a separate deal with Vodafone to provide exclusive video footage of a new acoustic session.

I think "alternative revenue streams" is the term used for this, but it strikes me that this is more akin to common sense than finding new ways of skinning the same goat. The industry may be changing, but the demand for and supply of music remains the same. The power, as always, is with the music-makers. It's now up to them to realise it.

jimcarroll@irish-times.ie