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While the untamed frontier of bootstrap music start-up remains a wide open field, the traditional music industry has already begun to explore and be influenced by the possibilities.

Three articles in this month's issue of Wired Magazine examine those forays and how they will impact the industry in the future.

Indirectly, all three suggest a major role for bootstrap entrepreneurs in an age where major technological developments have made music production and marketing easily accessible without huge major label budgets.

• For example, singer/songwriter Beck speaks with Wired contributing editor Eric Steuer about the death of the album and the emergence of a stream of work released in every conceivable medium including online. They also talk about how Beck's band signed up for a MySpace account and uploaded live music one night after a show and were surprised to get immediate traffic.

All of this prompts Steuer to ask:

Couldn't you do all that stuff on your own? Do you really even need a label anymore?

Do you indeed?

• And Nettwerk Music Group CEO Terry McBride is changing the rules of the music game and has grown his management firm from a small Vancouver startup to an industry powerhouse by encouraging artists to leave their major labels and start their own record companies. McBride then helps them market their music in every way imaginable and doesn't need the high profit margins of a corporate giant to help his clients make more money.

• Finally, the mainstream music industry has itself felt the effects of a bootstrapping online magazine called Pitchfork. The site's reviews are legendary and influential, especially in the indie music field.

Editor in chief Ryan Schreiber started his publication, which now employees six full-time staff members, part-timers and interns, as a one man operation on a Mac with a dial-up connection in the Minneapolis suburbs and has never strayed far from his bootstrapping roots.

He told Wire Magazine:

We survived for years on a very, very small readership and virtually no budget. It's still something that I could do independently, even if I didn't have the means to support a staff.

For another example of a small business approach surviving just fine in the big corporate music industry check out CD Baby. The small Portland, Oregon, distributor's website says the company sells only recordings sent directly to them by artists and gives the artist a $6 to $12 cut, something that would never happen at a major label.