The sweltering July heat draped the hilly Oshkosh campground playing home to Lifest. Under an enormous roof with no walls, four teenagers dressed in full suits sauntered onto a stage covered in couches, chairs, instruments and amplifiers. Shaggy haired 19-year-old Nathaniel Swokowski sat in front of a piano. He sang into roses taped to a microphone. Flowers, paintings and collages covered the empty areas of the stage.

The graceful resonance Swokowski drew out of 88 keys filled the air, intoxicating the small audience. His sincere falsettos soared and mingled with piano, drum, bass and guitar. It felt familiar, a kaleidoscope of color and harmonious notes.

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During a 35-minute set in early July 2005, I caught a glimpse that rekindled my hope for the future of musical creativity. Ivory, a small town band hoping to make a big-scene debut, awoke a vision of the originality and innovation of music.

But while I felt this awakening live, Ivory’s future more likely rests in the digital realm–a space far more crowded than the Oshkosh campground. One of tens of thousands of acts using MySpace to promote themselves, Ivory is trying to catch fire online. MySpace has expanded music online since it launched on Aug. 15, 2003, creating something never seen before in the music industry: the ability to distribute music in seconds to as many people as artists want.

This ease of distribution leads new bands to MySpace daily, forging a musical catch-22. While allowing small-town bands never-before-known access to a national stage, it has simultaneously oversaturated the music industry with new–and sometimes lacking–acts.

“MySpace does a lot of good when it comes to making your music available to a vast audience, but it acts as a double-edged sword in the sense that everyone else and their grandmother is allowed the same privilege,” said Nick Junkunc of The Box Social. “MySpace, while making it incredibly easy to expose yourself, has resulted in the complete flooding of bands, making it harder and harder to make your voice heard within the constraints of the opportunity given through things like MySpace and Purevolume.”

Before social networking, a band had little chance of being noticed in Wisconsin’s Fox River Valley. Record labels couldn’t afford to send scouts to a part of a state not known for its up-and-coming artists. To take a dream seriously, a band would have to move to Chicago, New York or Los Angeles to get the exposure needed to break through the ceiling between small-time and the charts.

MySpace changed that immediately and forever. Swokowski saw this and used it from the beginning.

“It's now so much easier for us to advertise, market and connect to our fans and create a wider fan base,” said Thomas Bishop, Ivory’s drummer. “Social networking tools help new bands connect more than anything.”

Waiting For Understanding was the first undertaking of the design that would one day become Ivory. Swokowski created it after drumming in a different band and wanting to try his own songs on the piano.

“It seems that Waiting For Understanding was a good name to start out with, seeing as I had no understanding or even the slightest idea about what kind of journey I was starting,” Swokowski said.

He met record executives while on tour with fellow Appleton band Number One Fan. They were impressed with the 19-year-old’s songwriting ability and personality and stayed in close contact over the next year. The band changed their name and their direction after adding Bishop in early 2005 and becoming Ivory.

Their musical maturation in the following months brought them recognition and popularity around Wisconsin. They recorded six songs at Madison’s Smart Studios in the summer and released a CD that fall.

Their popularity quickly led to a record deal with Carbon Copy Media, a subsidiary of Victory Records. After recording a full album and touring throughout the summer of 2006, a legal dispute between the label and Victory Records led to Ivory dropping out of the contract. Ivory went from being a few weeks away from releasing their first full-length album to having no way to distribute their music. A bleak future tested the band.