It’s a good point Greg, but if the reward for doing it is there, then the early adopters will train those that follow.

Of course, you need facilities that make these things a cinch, but an artist does need something that says “This is the real McCoy, this is where you’ll find the straight dope”.

It’ll probably be a bit like bloggers either using an external platform such as WordPress or installing a blogging site on their own server. When artists become so popular that they can afford/need a better guarantee of authenticity then they can find someone to go through the administrative hassle of setting up a webserver.

Thus one could set up a custom Mediawiki based artist self-labelling system. The newbie artist would still buy their own domain, but would have it resolved to this central site in the first instance. Eventually they’d point it to their own system. It’s possible the central system could even export/upload the necessary code and data as and when required.