As the slow process of moving towards a DRM-free world accelerates and more big and small bands dump their labels, I can’t help but wonder one question:

Who’s going to take care of all their web needs?

Without the financial backing of the the big record labels, musicians will find themselves handling more and more nuisance tasks of putting out a record. Everything from web design and development to album art creation will need to be done in-house or outsourced.

And so, a business opportunity arises. Who’s going to fill the need of all the solo bands out there trying to create a name for themselves. Seems like a lot of sites exist and help in one way or another, but none tie it all together to create a solid independent online presence for the bands.

Radiohead is a good example of a band that did it right. They’ve created hype around the new album “In Rainbows” via the band’s blog. After that followed a simple website to distribute the new music and make it easy for the fans to give them money.

Web solutions and consulting

This is the easy part. Web design and development isn’t exactly rocket science and parts of it can easily be outsourced to a network of designers and developers alike. This part is most likely the smallest chunk of potential income.

Music distribution

Bands will need a scalable solution if they’re going to offer high quality music up for download. I’m not a whiz at building scalable networks that can handle hundreds of downloads at once, but this part will probably be the most costly (bandwidth costs?).

Easy payment processing

Whether the music will have a price-tag or offered with donations, this process will have to be super simple to encourage more people to pay (if only for the DRM-free cause!). Input the price you’re willing to pay, enter credit card information and Buy. Having built a number of custom shopping carts before, I know firsthand this part will be fairly simple (and can be reused many times over) with a simple merchant account (ie. Authorize.net). Money will then be paid out to the bands, weekly, monthly, etc.

While PayPal is ideal for catching and properly handling of fraudulent transactions, it’s just not simple enough (in my eyes). The end user still has to go to their website to pay. It works, but not ideal.

Summary

In the end, it’s pretty easy to see that none of this is hard to do and in fact, there are already a great number of firms offering these solutions. Still, an all inclusive niche business targeting solely the music industry can succeed, especially now that the industry is hopefully beginning the end of a long (ten year?) transformation.

Food for thought » Competition: PureVolume, MySpace Music, and any other music-targeted social network.