"The old way of music getting produced and sold is outdated."

Recording processes haven't changed that much. If you have a band, recording still means sound-proofing, monitoring, mic selection and positioning; all the stuff an engineer does. If you're doing anything more complicated than a demo, this is not trivial. This costs money.

I agree when people criticise current retail and distribution -- physical distribution is expensive and wasteful, not to mention the fact that it inherently limits your audience. However to sell music -- enough to make a living -- just sticking it in a retail chain is not enough. You need to think about who the audience is, where they buy music, how you can promote your music to them etc. Again this is time and money.

"Why bother paying for all of this, when (as the author mentions) you can just do it yourself?"

Because mixing down and mastering is a skill in and of itself. There are plenty of musicians with these skills, but not as many as you think. The problem here is conflating writing and performance with recording and production. Related, but separate, requiring a different set of skills.

"Equipment is only getting cheaper and cheaper, and as far as mastering goes, well, "MP3 is enough""

Agreed, equipment is not the issue. It's now possible to get high-quality results with minimal gear -- assuming you have the skills. However, just because your target format is MP3, that doesn't mean you have to spend any less time or effort on the mastering. The final mixed stereo audio file needs to get the most out of the format. Issues to consider: downsampling, dithering and dynamic range.

"Yep, we won't, because who better to market the band than the band itself? Why pay somebody, when you can make a myspace/facebook/twitter/whatever and plaster it everywhere?"

Two reasons. Firstly, marketing is a lot of work. It takes time. Artists have a finite amount of time, so it's useful to be able to delegate it to marketing folk. Secondly, just jamming info on facebook etc, is not a replacement for an actual marketing push. Doing that in a coherent way takes knowlege and skill. Again, there are artists that can and do do this, but not everyone wants to devote the time to it.

"Now, branding is still pretty important, but still, quite a huge part of the traditional marketer's job has been replaced by the Internet."

That's wrong in my opinion. The internet has just become another medium for marketing. It's not a question of the internet replacing marketing, it's a question of who does the marketing on the internet, the artist or some professional they hire?

I'm not saying pro marketers are the only way to go, I'm just saying they're attractive part of getting involved with a label.

"I don't mean to sound insulting"

It's fine, I understand the internet makes it a bit hard to say critical things in a nice way :)

"Have you read The Long Tail? Why bother doing anything on the large scale?"

The problem here is thinking like this:

Labels = Major Labels = RIAA = Evil

In other words, you've been trapped into thinking all labels are large, slow-moving, customer-hostile entities, that labels on the whole are incapable of changing, while discounting the things they do for artists. I am not defending major labels -- I think they're largely fucked -- but it's naive to say that labels on the whole are incapable of participating in a changing market.

"Luckily, we only have to wait a few hours to find out, right?"

Yeah, and it turned out to be horse-pucky. I think we'll see some more inventive permutations of labels, but it's not gonna come from Apple.