>>I know very little of the music industry, but to me your comment sounds like record labels were this benevolent and creative force and now they are not.

It's not that they were benevolent, but 25 years ago they held the keys to the castle and disrupting production, distribution, and marketing was nearly impossible. Today with the rise of CDbaby and other agencies handling piecemeal work via the Internet (and bandwidth opening up to serve media), they're dead.

But until recently, their services were quite necessary.