The reason I know this is from personal experience. I'm own a music publishing company and our main business is licensing background and theme music for television & film production. Our clients are mostly studios and television stations & networks. It is a family business and has been in my family for over 70 years.

Back about 10-15 years ago, most of our competitors were also private small publishers like ourselves. But now, my 2 largest competitors are owned by EMI and BMG, 2 very large corporations.

I'm having a really hard time competing with them, especially with the company that's owned by BMG. I know for a fact that this company has lost money in each of the last 5 years. Yet with their super low prices and huge advertising campaigns they continue to gain market share. My understanding is that they also continue to lose more and more money each year. But this company is such a small part of BMG as a whole, that them losing a few million dollars per year is a drop in the bucket for BMG. I'm sure once they put everyone else out of business and have a monopoly in the industry, then they will raise their prices back to a reasonable level so they can be profitable.

I'm sure the same thing is going on in other industries as well. I've heard similar stories about WalMart putting local family owned stores out of business. Is this still the land of opportunity?