Norman86 wrote
i get that.. thats why i said the artists themselves need to jack up too!
they cant grow the industry if they arent proactive!
It's not a matter of being proactive. Indeed, careful analysis and good business sense might convince Billy Bob Jenkins and the Cow Pats to focus their attention on sales to fans at shows and maybe via their web site. For a start, their take per disc sold is bigger. That's not whatever the opposite of what proactive is , that's figuring out where your market is and how to interact with it.
Financial and marketing models are not uniform. Some artists make much more from live work than CDs. Some have boutique labels to produce discs (usually live, though not always) that may not be sold in retail stores against their "official" releases and are only available at shows or via the artist's web site. Several are getting leery about streaming services such as spotify (Bob Dylan recently pulled his entire catalog from streaming sites in Europe). iTunes is a component in that, and probably a long term replacement for retail stores, but if retail CD sales are not that big a deal for you anyway then iTunes may not change anything and setting up the structures to deal with it may, in the artist's opinion, be more trouble than it's worth.
