Regarding #1, there's definitely no complete winner out there yet so being on all of them is the best a band can do. Services like cdbaby.com propagate your tracks to dozens of such services (44 in all currently including iTunes, amiestreet.com, etc.) and also take care of other things for you like selling physical discs online and taking credit cards from sales at concerts, so that's probably the best thing going for a band right now. And once a clear winner in the online music sales appears, cdbaby.com will I'm sure also deal with them too on your behalf.
And as a comparison of profits from something like iTunes, I've heard major label artists make less than $1 on their digital album sales, and pennies on the song, whereas through the cdbaby.com submission to iTunes I get paid about $0.64 per song (up to $0.89 for a sale on iTunes UK after currency conversion!) or $6+/album.
For #2, I guess that's where booking and promo agencies come in, but they only tend to work with artists once they've built a following and can get people out to the gigs they set up.
In either case though, the only benefit added by major labels is advertising dollars (which also amounts to mainstream radio airplay, very hard to get without a major). This is basically VC for the music industry if you look at it that way. So maybe just getting some angel investors interested in your band might be a better approach too...
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Regarding #1, there's definitely no complete winner out there yet so being on all of them is the best a band can do. Services like cdbaby.com propagate your tracks to dozens of such services (44 in all currently including iTunes, amiestreet.com, etc.) and also take care of other things for you like selling physical discs online and taking credit cards from sales at concerts, so that's probably the best thing going for a band right now. And once a clear winner in the online music sales appears, cdbaby.com will I'm sure also deal with them too on your behalf.
And as a comparison of profits from something like iTunes, I've heard major label artists make less than $1 on their digital album sales, and pennies on the song, whereas through the cdbaby.com submission to iTunes I get paid about $0.64 per song (up to $0.89 for a sale on iTunes UK after currency conversion!) or $6+/album.
For #2, I guess that's where booking and promo agencies come in, but they only tend to work with artists once they've built a following and can get people out to the gigs they set up.
In either case though, the only benefit added by major labels is advertising dollars (which also amounts to mainstream radio airplay, very hard to get without a major). This is basically VC for the music industry if you look at it that way. So maybe just getting some angel investors interested in your band might be a better approach too...