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hmm...how can you tour the globe when you can't afford it? like i said, being well known on the internet doesn't pay for flights/insurance etc.(although mrs allien and mr apparat certainly don't have this problem, because they are already fairly well known acts)
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Yeah but that was true before the Internet too. Obviously it's not as easy as "just tour" but I'd argue it's far easier than it was ten years ago for artists with little to no resources to establish a world wide audience. Unless the artist is also a business and management savant they're still going to have to work with middlemen in order to get the ball rolling but at least they're not at the complete mercy of the whims of the corporate music industry. And, after that first tour, they should have a much better understanding of How Everything Works.
As for holding up promos - you still have to rely on music portals and publications to achieve the largest possible penetration for your work. A good review in Pitchfork == instant career traction. You can't rely on someone listing the band as a favorite in a MySpace profile alone, but you can rely on a review within a few key online music publications as near instanteous worldwide tastemaker awareness for you and your work. To generate that buzz, you need to market, and under the traditional model you can't market on the day of release because then there is no pre-awareness for you work, your album ends up sitting on the shelf not getting sold during that period and the retailers end up saying "No thanks, have your album back because shelf space is valuable by the second - and don't send anything else." Now, things are changing with the non-traditional retailers like Apple but it takes a long time switch an entire industry to a new way of doing things.