Who are the Greedy ones? (Score 1)

I have yet to hear anyone state that if the artists play ball with the record companies, they, themselves, can become filthy rich. The problem here is that you have many artists that have no problem making large sums of money for the record companies so long as they get to live the superstar lifesytle. It seems to me that the artists are not united in the thought that there is a problem with the current system. So long as the general populace purchase the music from these artists and these record companies, this business model will persist.

I run a independent label and although we press origial work on CD, I am of the opinion that this technology is becoming obsolete. I am not willing to concede that mp3 quality has surpassed that of a CD but there will come a time in the relatively near future in which network bandwidth will allow the sharing of CD quality (uncompressed) files. At this point, will this conversation become irrelevent. Artists will have the ability to distribute their music directly, cutting out the middleman all together (unless you consider their ISPs/Webmasters middlemen), but are they willing to live a lifestyle that is not as comfortable for the sake of their artistic integrity? Perhaps, if this new model of music distribution becomes popular, we will only create new monster companies and monopolies and we will be discussing something different but also the same.

Does anybody know how the current mp3 only lables (ie http://www.notype.com) have managed to pan out a living? Is this model sucessful?