You left marketing and radio promotion off of the things that labels did and still do for their artists. Both require relationships, money and expertise, and are still very valuable things they have to offer good artists.
Sure, but the system for doing this has been essentially rigged against the artist for years. Very few see fair royalties after the very expensive radio promoter has been paid, and the advertising budget has been tallied, all of which comes straight out of the artist's bottom line -- essentially the money for this promotion was loaned.
And even fewer of them have the resources to pay the accountants and lawyers it takes to make sure they're not getting ripped off.
It's partly the immense dissatisfaction that artists have with this system that motivates them to find other ways to make money.
You're confusing the big labels with a heavy marketing presence with the wide swath of medium sized labels that used to exist but no longer do.
Now the situation is big labels pushing, mostly pre-internet era, artists with enough clout to penetrate global markets and extremely small niche labels with no market penetration.
In typical anarchaic fashion, digital evangelists diss the old way completely in a damn them all mentality, without really addressing the other half of the equation.
Recording music is labour intensive and great music is difficult. It takes entire teams of producers, coaches, engineers and songwriters to help a band polish an album to sufficiently high quality. Yet more people are needed for marketing, sales, pr, distribution, design, business development and so on. None of these people can be marked to zero. Great content is expensive.
Art is also high risk. For every 100 ideas, 99 of them are bad and 1 will strike a chord with the public and go big. That's just the way art works. It's not a bug, it's a feature. Art is taking a risk, despite the odds. But someone has to pay for that risk. The bigger the project, the bigger the risk.
To say that a label offers "nothing" is completely disingenuous and totally ignorant. Labels are not the enemy. Go out and talk to the owners.. most of them are very humble and genuine people who really do want to help artists succeed. I've talked them, that's how I know.
You want to know what happens when you put 500 musicians in a room with platinum award winning artists and label reps and lawyers? I can tell you since I've been there.. the musicians don't ask the artists much, but they ask the reps and lawyers a thousand questions about how they can make a living doing what they love in a world hell bent on devaluing their work.
