Instead of allowing the recording industry to cherry pick who
they want to make a star next year and then take 90% of the takings many up and coming creative folks are doing there own marketing and reaping the rewards.
http://www.nola.com/timespic/stories/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1222665702241690.xml&coll=1When Kelvin Brown remembered to check the Web site in April, a year after he uploaded some of his songs, $4,500 was sitting in his account.
"I'm like, 'Are you serious?' " said Brown, an aspiring hip-hop producer and Loyola University music student.
Brown used a Web site called TuneCore to sell his songs, and other sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, to promote them. While major record labels complain about the state of the music industry, Brown is part of a generation of young musicians-slash-entrepreneurs who embrace technology and the tools it gives them to make and sell music. So far, off that first album he has made a profit of $5,877.
Whats important here is that he still owns the rights to his own work, there are no greedy middlemen lining up to help themselves as we see in the traditional RIAA member business model where many artists who only make one single album are often never going to see a cent howevr well it sells.
This is called ""fair by the industry as they claim all the revenue goes to pay for their "investment", what many non artists dont understand is that for using the labels services in this manner means your often buying things like studio time, production costs, artwork creation etc from the labels own in house teams who overprice their services beyond their real worth, thus giving them the ideal excuse to claw back nearly 90% of the take, supporting the recording industry is simply stabbing yourself in the foot, cut out the middle man and give real talent a go and if it turns out to be not exactly what you want just remember that a free sample costs nothing and with the money you will save you got the cash to purchase at least half a dozen artists efforts that you do like.
Keeping the fat cats fat is bad for music.