Lucas, I’d add two bullet points to your list of obstacles:

– A very low percentage of bands are actually tech savvy enough to create their own websites.

-MySpace, which is by far the most popular way for bands to gain a web-presence, hosts mp3s and makes them available for listening, but goes to relatively draconian measures to prevent them from having reliable, publicly available urls.

Together, these two obstacles constitute a killer one-two punch: MySpace lures artists into using it as a stop-gap against building a real website; MySpace only lets artists put their music online in a crippled innovation-hostile way (in a flash widget, hidden behind temporary on-demand-generated urls, un-linkable, and un-discussable).

This means that most of the indie, unsigned, and local bands — exactly the ones who should have the most to gain from making access to their music for bloggers, fans, and other people in the conversation as easy as possible — are locked into a service that reduces the ability of their music to participate in things like mp3 blogs, XSPF content resolvers, and more general content detection services.

I don’t think the solution to this problem is going to come from bands moving from MySpace to running their own sites, even on services that make it really easy like Blogger. Just like we talk about when it comes to the labels’ ongoing role in distribution/promotion, the only thing that bands can be relied on to do for themselves is make music. Everything else is beyond their core competencies and interests.

Our best hope here is to pressure Virb, Facebook, and the other services jockeying to suck away some of MySpace 100 million users to do the right thing in regards to music as an online resources (i.e. putting it up at permanent publicly accessible urls that are well-described with extensive metadata). And the best way to do that is to show the bloggers the benefits that accrue to them in publicity: my band’s best publicity successes have come from contacting all the mp3 bloggers who I thought might like our stuff and sending them links to mp3s on our own site (where we host permanent links to all of our music). You’d be amazed how many of the bloggers commented, both to me and in public posts, about how refreshing it was to find a band putting all their music up with good urls. It’s like they never see it — and it greatly increases their odds of writing about you.

If we could get bands to think of lightnet music hosting as a can’t-live-without feature in their social network/web-presence, things would really start to get interesting for all the developers waiting in the wings to build the next generation of exciting music apps.