Any independent musician marketing themselves in a serious way should read this guy’s blog:

Welcome

And his free ebook:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120622232137/http://newmusicstrategies.com:80/ebook/

What is prompting me to write this is this particular post:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150603073711/http://newmusicstrategies.com/2007/04/15/thing-11-the-death-of-scarcity/

It is basically a brief article about the economics of endless supply in how it relates to music online. It is a concept anyone serious about selling music should take seriously.

There may have been a time where you would press a thousand copies of a CD, give away a couple of hundred as promos, and try and sell the other eight hundred. Now, you can press a thousand, give away a million, and still sell the thousand.

The death of scarcity makes a nonsense of the notion of the ‘lost sale’. If someone would never have bought your music in the first place, but acquires the music through some other means (perhaps as a recipient of one of those million promotional copies), you haven’t “lost a sale”, you’ve gained a listener. More importantly, you’ve gained attention

I get so tired of hearing independent labels or musicians crying about how it is unfair that piracy is killing their business. This idea of downloading killing the business is absurd. This whole downloading phenomenon is not going away, and that’s good! This idea of every download being a lost sale has always been a load of horse shit. This guy’s blog and ebook are exceptional sources of ideas and information on how to deal with this changing business climate.