Major vs. independent record labels.

Universal music group: (UMG) is the global music leader with strong market positions in recorded music, music publishing, and merchandising.

The recorded music business discovers and develops recording artists and then markets and promotes their music across a wide array of formats and platforms. UMG's music publishing company, Universal Music Publishing Group, discovers and develops songwriters, and owns and administers copyrights to musical compositions for use in recordings, public performances, and related uses, such as films and advertisements. Bravado, UMG’s merchandising company, sells artist and music branded products via multiple sales points including online, fashion retail, and live performances.

The Black Eyed Peas become first group to sell over 6 million US digital downloads with “I Gotta Feeling”.

MUTE::Mute was founded by Daniel Miller in 1978, and since then has signed and developed some of the world’s most influential recording artists – including Depeche Mode, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Yazoo, Goldfrapp, Erasure, Moby and Richard Hawley – and become home to a crop of emerging talent and recent signings such as Josh T. Pearson, Big Deal, Beth Jeans Houghton and S.C.U.M.

Whilst maintaining a firmly eclectic roster, from the earliest days of The Normal, Fad Gadget and DAF through to the techno era with artists such as Plastikman / Richie Hawtin and Speedy J, and to the present day with hybrid electronic artists such as Yeasayer and S.C.U.M, the label has always been a champion of electronic music.

Mute also looks after a catalogue of seminal electronic artists such as Can and Cabaret Voltaire.

Mute Liberation Technologies has now been running since autumn 1994, as an FTP site, a Telnet site and a BBS (all no longer available) and since spring 1995 as a web site. The web site was relaunched in July 2004 and the version you are viewing now was launched in August 2011.

October 2010 saw the release of Dust Lane by the French artist Yann Tiersen. The album incorporated vintage electronic sounds and textures recorded over two years in France and the Philippines. In November Mute released Einstürzende Neubauten's fourth album in the Strategies Against Architecture series. The album continues with an archive compilation of the band's output from 2002 to 2010.

The major company has a huge advantage over the smaller independent companies as they have financial power to advertise and distribute their artists material over a larger area. But smaller more independent companies can focus more on a single genre and target audience to maximise their output of sales