Let your music go out there for free. If you hit it big you get the money in any case. How? Concerts and appearances. Licensed items sales. CD sales. Fan clubs and their online revenues from advertisers.
If you are a garage band today, you will stay that way under the current model unless some A&R guy comes along who likes you. If you can self-empower the musician by wide distribution of their music for free, then you create more opportunities for the tons of talent that is out there. Musicians are literally a dime a dozen. Look at how many kids wind up coming out of school with some sort of music education! Most of them are proficient with their instruments too.
Who will lose the most? The established acts. If they want to insist on royalties, then let them marginalize themselves in a new dynamic net marketplace, which in a matter of a few years will generate it's own guitar heroes. As the new bands come along, new online streaming audio stations will pick up on them, resulting in wider distribution. Yeah, Emo isn't popular here it seems but somewhere is an Emo star waiting to emerge as the Next Big Thing, right along his thrash metal cousin, his trance cousin, his rockabilly cousin and his country cousin...LOL!
The market paradigm is microcasting. The audience is about niches not masses. The advertisers of today don't buy just one media source, they buy a package that fits their needs. The day of AM Top 40 died a long time ago and I watched it flourish and pass away.
New ways of doing things for new times. I'm all for that!
Rick