The music business, like many others, is feeling the effects of the Information Technology revolution. With the development of cheap and powerful multitrack tape-recorders, synthesizers and computers, commercial 'product' and the products of home recording are rapidly becoming indistinguishable. There must be thousands of people, in this country alone, messing about in back bedrooms and making great music that no one, barring friends and relatives, ever gets to hear.

It is now possible, with a couple of thousand pounds capital expenditure and a lot of time and effort, to produce broadcast quality albums at home — but what do you do next? Just as technology is becoming accessible to more and more musicians on the street, the music industry is restricting the market to fewer and fewer artists. As far as I can tell, there are two currently available methods for distributing music:

• Method 1. Make a record, at home or maybe in a cheap studio, copy it on to cassette with a black-and-white insert and knock it out at a couple of quid a time to all the people you know. You might even sell a few at gigs, assuming you're in a band and can get gigs — easy if you play R'n'B, but if the promoter never heard the music before... let's face it, publicans are in the business of selling beer.

This method offers total control of distribution, profits and all artistic decisions, but its unlikely you'll shift more than a thousand copies. It's hard to get a local record shop to sell a tape for you, and even harder to get airplay.

• Method 2. Make a record, in the best studio you can afford, then produce hundreds of copies on cassette, vinyl, or even CD. Now give them away to every record company you've ever heard of. If you're lucky, your 'product' may arrive at the top of that day's mailbag, and an A&R person will spend a whole 20 seconds listening to it. If the record company likes the tape and you meet other essential criteria (ie. the lead singer has nice legs/cheekbones/hairstyle, one of the band has a regular part in a daytime soap, and all your tunes are in 4/4 at 120 bpm), then maybe you'll get a deal.

Of course, you'll have to make a video. There'll be loads of promo costs, lawyers fees, management fees, the songs will have to be re-recorded with a flavour-of-the-month producer, and so on. All this will cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, and with all that 'creative input' flying around, it might not even sound like your music when it's finished. This method may bring you airplay, TV work, fame and fortune but it's more likely to simply make a contribution to the EEC demo-tape mountain. You will have spent all the money it takes to set up a small home studio, and even fewer people will have heard your music than in Method 1. Even if you make your own single, it's hard to get airplay these days. If, like me, you make what you think is good music, and you'd like more people to hear it, what do you do? I have some ideas...

• Really local radio. What would happen if local radio stations were to give a little time to local musicians? Such time could be allocated on a local arts magazine or 'What's On' Show. Imagine a show broadcast seven nights a week from 6.00 to 8.30 pm (just before people start going out for the evening) composed of exhibition, theatre and film reviews interspersed with tapes by local musicians.

On commercial stations, such a show could sell advertising to record shops, venues, musical instrument shops, listings magazines, recording studios, cinemas and so-on. People on their way to gigs would know what they were going to hear. Venues would attract more punters, and maybe local musicians could divert some PRS royalties from Kylie Minogue and Frank Sinatra. All it would take is a well presented show with good broadcast quality material. Who could lose?

• Audio shareware. Suppose a dozen writers got together and each contributed one track to a C60 cassette sampler album. Mastering, colour printing for inserts, copying for a thousand cassettes (plus a few DAT tapes for radio stations) would come to less than £100 each, and the tape could retail at £2-3. The insert could give details of albums by the featured artists, and include a contact address through which people could order other tapes.

If such an enterprise were run co-operatively, profits could be ploughed into advertising and distribution, both to record stores and as a collective demo to more record companies than any one individual could afford. If the first run sold, contributors could expect to get back the money they put in, but most of their profits would be from sales of their own albums. Assuming the first release was successful, the experiment could be repeated to form a cassette-magazine, each issue containing a backlist of tapes currently available.

Sampler albums are not a new idea, but they're usually made at a loss by record companies promoting their own artists. This would be a low-cost, low-profit venture by a 'clearing house' that merely passed orders on to its members. Alternatively, such an operation could be administered by a magazine, in a similar way to the computer shareware pages in SOS.

• Making contact. The people I know who have the biggest record collections are almost all musicians themselves. If each person who sent their precious work to magazines for review were to issue a phone or PO Box number where they could be reached, then perhaps we could swap or sell each other tapes. A lot of what came through the post might not be to your taste, but think of the possibilities for composers to swap ideas or to collaborate. The development of musical ideas is driven far too much by radio and TV. How about a little cross-fertilisation?

It's not my intention to judge anyone else's music, but it seems to me that a music industry where a few artists make millions and nearly everyone else makes nothing is basically unhealthy. In book publishing, there are many thousands of authors who receive a few hundred quid a year from the books they write. They will never make their living as writers, and they will never give up their day jobs, but people read their work, and that's what makes our literature so rich and varied. Musicians have the technology to contribute to music in the same way. All we need is to be heard.

Richard Garrett is a singer/songwriter and guitarist who has already made two cassette albums, with a third on the way. By night he sings with The Usual Suspects blues band in Bristol, and by day, he tries to convince future schoolteachers that computers don't bite.

He can be contacted at the following adress: Bristol Polytechnic, (Contact Details).