Very much agree. Actually, one of the panelists at the conference was a Hong Kong star named Edison Chen. He was with a major and then left to do things on his own because he said his label just didn’t get it, tried to control everyting he did, and he didn’t make any moeny anyway. Now he gives music away for free on the web but says he’s never been happier or more successful–he makes his own creative decisions and can monetize his musioc how he wants. His experience was characterized as being an extreme one, but I know a band signed to a large regional indi label that makes terrific music but the label has really no clue how to market this band because the band plays rock but the label really only understands pop. So the label has done what Edison called “putting you in the freezer”–essentially shelving you until your deal runs out. I think Edison’s experience is reasonably common, and labels have to9 figure out how to deal with that or they will lose more artists to the DIY approach.

I’d add a third point, which is kind of a hybrid of points one and two: Artists are not passive players in the industry anymore, content with merely playing shows, recording albums, and following the music industry’s directives. There is very much a DIY undercurrent percolating among new and established bands. You see it in the U.S. with thousands of bands signing up for MySpace accounts, or making arrangements with local DJs or newspaper websites to play their own music, without record label participation. You see it with successful bands like Weezer, which uses its own website to preview song tracks or connect with fans. I recently visited Taipei and saw a lot of grassroots band activity totally outside the sphere of the major industry players — people running their own music festivals, recording their own CDs, and even creating their own performance and purchasing space at a complex called “The Wall”. It’s really a different world, and I think the industry needs to learn how to participate more as enablers rather than controllers.