I was having a conversation about local musicians with a (somewhat older) friend of mine. He was remarking about how talented a lot of street musicians are, and how he hoped that one day, the best of them would be discovered by a talent scout in the recording industry.

"Why?" I asked him plainly. "So said record company can take a huge chunk of their earnings for themselves?"

He clearly didn't like this set of questions, so I went on to explain that any musician or band in this day and age is perfectly capable of recording, producing, mixing, mastering, and distributing their music without any help from a major record label. He shook his head. "There are still some things a band can't do for themselves, Jim. Marketing, distribution, all of those things require the resources of a big company."

If I didn't know any better (and I probably don't), I'd say he almost felt sorry for me for being so naive.

Take the band Hawthorne Heights...they're not my favorite musical act by a wide margin, but they are a band that formed, wrote and recorded their music on their own, and developed a fan base using interactions with fans through social media. That's where the marketing and distribution happened, too.

It didn't take a lot of money, but it wasn't easy. Building a commercially successful band from nothing involves a lot of sweat equity. However, with a little creativity and perseverance, it can be done. In a world where the Internet provides a decent alternative, getting offered a contract from a record label isn't necessarily a ticket to freedom. Just as likely, it could end up putting the band in an artistically constricting situation that isn't nearly worth what it's costing them.

Why, then, do so many musicians believe that they need to wait for someone in a suit and tie to validate their work? Is it some form of learned helplessness that parallels Stockholm syndrome?