hey there now, sonny. I'm 51, and some of them still fit just fine, thanks. I even go to several concerts each year.

Why do you do this? You know that most of the money for an album doesn't go to the artist? Do you buy the physical CD or do you buy the song on iTunes?

The vast vast majority of people do not have thousands of dollars to spend on music.

You don't know that, because you don't know what sort of music he listens to or what deals those artists have with their labels. There are certainly cases where labels fuck artists, but there are a lot of others where they deliver value. This idea of blaming all the big bad labels is little more than an excuse not to pay for music. Along the way, it's crushed lots of small independent labels that had great partnerships with their artists but get blamed for the perceived moral failings of the majors.

You know that if you spend $0, the artist gets nothing, right? Then their label drops them because they aren't profitable.

not necessarily. I'm quite happy to be shown ads while I stream that generate revenue for the artist.

I'm not even kidding. Nothing is stopping you from writing a $50 check and sending it as a donation.

If the artists don't like the deal that labels are giving them, they don't have to take it. They can build their own fan base, learn marketing, get exposure and sell their own stuff through iTunes and other places. A lot of artists are opting to do just that.

I know that the money doesn't all go to the artists - what would you have me (or the GP) do instead, not pay for any of it?

Mail them a check. Mail them cash. Hand them cash in person. Send them bitcoins; if they're tech-savvy enough.

Like many scaling problems, that's a good problem to have: at that point, you can afford to have people working for you depositing checks, which is pretty much the inverse of the power relationship artists have with labels.

You don't know what the relationship with the label is. Some artists come in with their own label and only need distributor to reach a bigger audience (artists $$$/labels$$). Some come in completely unknown and the label has to front all the money (artists $ / label $$$$), and some are quite happy to be on a smaller label and let the label handle the business side of things.

> at that point, you can afford to have people working for you depositing checks

...and paying royalties for samples, collaborators, songwriters. Well now we have to hire a guy to handle all of this and you can either pay him/her a salary or a cut of the sales. Now we've slipped back into the label distributor problem.

Many of them do a good job handling fan mail. It sounds like a nice problem to have.

>There is a very good reason that many musicians become involved with labels, promoters, distributors, etc.

There are some good reasons for artists to outsource administrative errands, management. There's also the crappy reason that is the monopolization of the major distribution channels.

should be a link to somewhere I can buy albums for $10-15USD each.

I have been steadily moving to buying only digitally released music, but some artists and labels make this very difficult.

Doing it right are:

* Boomkat.com (reasonable FLAC surcharge)

* digital-tunes.com (same price for FLAC/MP3)

* bleep.com

* hdtracks.com (sort of, the markup is massive)

Failing are:

* Amazon, iTunes et al - ~256kbit-ish music, often mastered terribly. (Yes, I'm aware that AAC is a bit higher quality at the same bitrate)

* Beatport.com (you want me to pay how much extra for WAV?!)

* Almost every major label - I can't order lossless tracks from most of them