[metachor]

That's disingenuous. How well would it scale for a musician to personally handle depositing checks from millions of fans? There is a very good reason that many musicians become involved with labels, promoters, distributors, etc., which is to free up the time of the artist to focus on what they are actually interested in doing: writing and playing music.

[dragonwriter]

> How well would it scale for a musician to personally handle depositing checks from millions of fans?

Like many scaling problems, that's a good problem to have: at that point, you can afford to have people working for you depositing checks, which is pretty much the inverse of the power relationship artists have with labels.

[yardie]

> the inverse of the power relationship artists have with labels.

You don't know what the relationship with the label is. Some artists come in with their own label and only need distributor to reach a bigger audience (artists $$$/labels$$). Some come in completely unknown and the label has to front all the money (artists $ / label $$$$), and some are quite happy to be on a smaller label and let the label handle the business side of things.

> at that point, you can afford to have people working for you depositing checks

...and paying royalties for samples, collaborators, songwriters. Well now we have to hire a guy to handle all of this and you can either pay him/her a salary or a cut of the sales. Now we've slipped back into the label distributor problem.

[fnordfnordfnord]

>How well would it scale for a musician to personally handle depositing checks from millions of fans?

Many of them do a good job handling fan mail. It sounds like a nice problem to have.

>There is a very good reason that many musicians become involved with labels, promoters, distributors, etc.

There are some good reasons for artists to outsource administrative errands, management. There's also the crappy reason that is the monopolization of the major distribution channels.