RE: The Steem-Powered Web Will Turn Musicians From “Unpaid Interns” to Paid Employees of Society
If you sign to a label you really do end up only earning about 10% of the revenue from your music. You definitely don't get to keep the full 70% of what iTunes pays out, for example.
If iTunes sells an album for $10, they then send 70% ($7) to the LABEL, who then send the royalties ($1) to the band. So the band earns $1 per record lets say. Then 360 deals became common so now if the band earns $1,000 from playing a decent gig, they only earn 10% of that too.
The problem is that there is no good source of funding to bands early on. Therefore musicians do stupid things like sign bad deals that take away their ability to earn. Stuff like Kickstarter and Patreon has made a huge difference in the industry already, and Steem is like that on steroids. It will result in more musicians being independent and financially sustainable.
Yes, of course in the chain of selling your music, using eg a label, the label actually execute tasks you as an artist dont have to do, or may not even have the network to do so. That type of work is not free of charge in a capitalistic world. And to be honest, you can say: I sell my music on Steemit, but your audience is SOOO much less than through a channel like iTunes, you may limit the income. Yes, today we are in very early stages of crypto and crypto based services and competition is almost not there using these new technologies and when getting a single upvote from eg @dsound account, suddenly the revenue from posting a single track to Dsounds, becomes huge in comparison, with eg selling through iTunes while almost nobody using iTines knows you as an artists. But these times will change when competition increase and number of user of eg Steem, or Musicoin will increase (a lot), then you will have te spend a lot more time to get noticed, to get the votes, and will not be able to ride the relatively easy route Steem/Musicoin seem to be at the moment. Art NEVER sells itself, it needs a LOT of business work to sell it.
Agree with you many artists signing bad deals with labels, sure! And also agree with you that todays world, without the blockchain and crypto currencies already provide tools to do it differently, indeed the crowdfunding way for instance as you mentioned. I really dont see why blockchain is the driver to increase the tool set for bands and artists to create and sell their music. The blockchain will add value, I do agree, but to other elements of the complete puzzle, like control music rights, acces rights and permissions, distribution of the music itself and so on.
BTW, you dont need a label to publish your music on iTunes, or Beatport or other music selling platform. Or when for some reason these companies require a 'label' company, then create your own label, as I know quite a number of artist having their own registered label. Be prepared to do all the work yourself, or pay others to handle all the work required to run a label though.
In a more detailed way I posted about this topic in this post: https://steemit.com/blockchain/@edje/artists-music-blockchains-crypto-currencies-the-realistic-view