I think the industry suffers mightely from the tin ear it hires for A&R and prospect hires. They may sign like 10 acts and lose money on 9 of those acts and have only one prosper, which is typically the case nowadays. IF they payed more attention to detail rather than hire clique-ish trend spotters they might be going somewhere and be recouping more of there money back than placing all their eggs in one basket and hoping one of those acts might bale them out from losing money on the previous 9. There's no reason to not get 10 great acts if they looked for a A&R worth something and not some tin ear dude with good contacts and networking skills.
That's the only reason I welcome the digital age it gives more non-standard artists people who have websites, know html, are personal digi-recorders the ability to become their own startups and weed themselves out if they suck from the herd, hopefully.
If you do good in this upcoming digital age it would be because you have the tools out there to pull yourself from your own bootstraps up and be successful. There is no reason why we need 100-Pixies ripoffs, 20-GYBE! imitators, 30-Belle and Sebastian knockoffs all the time on "indie radio" or "indie blogospheres" just because they're "avant-garde" not Greenday or Jessica Simpson. Im just hoping as more of America or the world gets into this digital age and figures out how to demistify the art of music they'll start to rate both people in big labels and people on myspace.com etc. with equal venom and aplomb. There is a bigger case out there of people sucking and coasting along in music right now just because technology let's them or because general attitudes are letting them think that's the way to go.
Seriously we need a faster Darwin-effect on music in general right now more than ever.
*end rant*
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