Thanks for a thoughtful post, Peter. I believe you’ve taken the idea in the right direction–“what is the right for of rebundling to serve the artist’s needs?”.

I really think you’re dead on right when you say “But the Net is changing the environment, so it’s possible to do a lot of this work without the huge outlay, without impressing a bunch of A&R guys at a major, without having a rolodex with contacts up and down the “old boy’s club” of this industry”.

That’s what tunecore and CDbaby offer. You don’t pretend to be the marketing clout of a record label–you’re an artist service. Yet what you’re trying to do–to rebundle to fit artists–is the right direction.

Let’s take as read that one can use your service and get no or few downloads. You’re not, as you acknowledge, the silver bullet. But the importance of your idea, whether it succeeds in your individual company’s case or not, is that you see that the old constructs of how artists distribute need no longer apply.

You’re right that the “big question is always, “Okay, I’m on iTunes, AmazonMP3, eMusic, all those big stores, but how do I get people to notice me, to find out about my music and thus help me build a fan base who buys it?”.

To me, it’s the creatino of media, whether formal or informal, to help artists solve this question that is the next step. I don’t believe this is the job of tunecore or cdbaby–I think it’s a new thing that is arising and must arise.
When it arises, then the liberation from the traditional record company will be complete.

Thank you for your very thoughtful response.
I have no aspirations to be a commercial artist, being a hobbyist netlabel kind of guy. But it’s such a heady bit of fun, this thing you’re doing, that it’s tempting to do a tunecore album if for no other reason than the old-fashioned fun of being able to search amazon and see mp3s available there.

Best of fortune in getting tunecore to grow and thrive.