I don’t worry that marketplaces behave like marketplaces, with better-capitalized resources spending to get the word out on their product.
I don’t worry that we live in a marketplace culture, or that people want to figure out ways to make money by influencing tastes.

I also don’t worry that today’s up-and-coming
indie voice in the wilderness is tomorrow’s corporate megalith, either releasing its own records or singing a corporate song about label releases. I remember when a few magazines we now may think of as similarly passe’ were “the voices of the 1960s counterculture”.

What interests me is that the technology removes a sufficient amount of the economic marketplace hegemony to give indies alternative ways to get the word out. As I sit here listening on my mp3 player to Dosem’s fine new electronica EP on the Spanish netlabel Antiritmo, I begin to believe that even the least-capitalized but best-intentioned people releasing in the Creative Commons can bridge the gap from Spain to north Texas.

It looks like to me that a musician with a good recording can find ways to get distribution, and notice, and sell downloads of her/his work. This is a great step, even if, in the worst pessimistic world, the market share captured is relatively small. It will still be a way for indie and different voices to find ways to earn income off of their music.

I hope for a small-business-model music industry of savvy acts marketing themselves that way,
even if the local video store and the local ad aggregator promote behemoths of age and wing-span formerly known only to japanese cinema.
We can have our dinosaurs, and hide from them, too.