I don’t think all artists are capable of being successful without marketing help. What they need are marketing services to help them promote themselves – they don’t need labels that take all of their money. Some artists have a good business sense, and can do everything on their own – others may need assistance in how to market themselves properly…but either way, the artist should be making the majority of the money on their music, not the minority.

Just my two cents on that.

@Joe

Thanks for the link. I’ve updated the article

Apparently all this fuss is in regard to a comment which is being presented as a reaction to a new development but, is in fact, an old quotation.

There’s several things left unsaid in here that has been “out there” about this debate. Many of them derogatory of Apple. Your title here suggests the same, but thankfully your article doesn’t.

For every 99 cent song sold on the ITMS, 70 cents goes to the labels. That leaves Apple 29 cents to work with. That pays for bandwidth, content distribution of both music and podcasts, personnel, storage, servers, data centers, etc. The labels don’t want to lay out an extra amount to the artists even though they are receiving the lion’s share of the money from every song sold. Hence, “let’s get Apple to do it” and “we can even make them look like money-grubbing bastards in the process” has become the modus operandi of the labels.

In this day and age of artists able to completely perform, record, post, mix-down, and print their own media, and having a content distribution mechanism such as the ITMS, there IS NO NEED for labels any more. Once *they* realize it, maybe they’ll go away, and let the market re-adjust to today’s technology.

And yes, I *am* an artist, and *have* done recordings this way, and we did nicely even though we were relatively unknown except in our region.