Let me begin by saying that the "Platinum Album Era" is in its twilight years.

For better or worse, the days of selling music are over. Peer-to-Peer networks are growing larger, faster and harder to control at an amazing velocity. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the music industry in general have proven they are incapable of stopping piracy.

Copyright protections are at best fun puzzles for nerds to crack in between sessions of Dungeons and Dragons.

At worst they turn in to public relations nightmares like Sony BMG's recent attempts to use their XCP content protection to discourage illegal use of song files. Sony's protection program backfired when it was discovered that XCP was designed to hack into computers like a virus, compromising the safety and stability of their customer's computers. Sony now finds itself facing class-action lawsuits, disgruntled customers and angry artists.

Attempts to legislate the problem away have proved to be futile as well. By the time the law caught up to Napster, Kazaa was already there to replace it. By the time it caught up to Kazaa, BitTorrent was already doing the same thing, only faster. By the time officials find a way to clamp down on BitTorrent, I can only assume that music will be beamed directly into my brain from pirate servers in Sweden.

The artists who will succeed in the future are those who accept this as fact and work from there. So what is the newly formed emoskacore band to do in this frightening new world?

Geeks broke the old business model and they'll show us the new one. The first step is to jump on the Web and go read some Web comics. Web comics are basically newspaper comic strips published on the Web. These budding young artists discovered a way to distribute their art through a medium that was cheaper and more accessible than publishing and newspaper syndication. Variety and specialization flourished as art and both were allowed to flow quickly and easily out into the world.

Of course these artists ran into the same problem that young musicians now face -- there was no way to sell their art directly. Publishing on the Internet allowed artists to distribute their work but not to sell it. This proves to be a challenge to the hobbyists who are looking to make a career out of their work. What ensued was an amazing study in the powers of the free market. Web comic artists experimented with basically every business model available -- subscription fees, advertising communes and even flat out charity.

The debate is less heated now because Web comic artists discovered how much people love T-shirts. It turns out that if they give the art away, they can build a fan base that will buy all kinds of T-shirts, stickers, posters and more. I imagine there are more then a few of you out there with your "Saves the Day" T-shirts and spiffy white belts thinking, "But wait, I go to basement shows and local bars all the time and bands already sell all kinds of merchandise." Yes Dorothy, I've played a cruel trick on you -- you've been wearing the ruby slippers all along. Smart bands understand fan support brings revenues in merchandise and ticket sales.

Here's an example: If your band could get one in every 40 students at Penn State to listen to and enjoy your music, that's 1,000 people, a venue the size of the Crowbar. If you have the ability to draw a maximum occupancy crowd of college kids and still can't turn a profit, you need to get a business manager.

The problem is that to accumulate a fan base of 1,000 kids, you need to make all 40,000 Penn State students listen to your music. How do you do that? In the old model you needed the music industry. The value of getting on a major label was that they could get you airtime on radio stations, a video on MTV and interviews with Carson Daly. They put your music out there.

These days you can accomplish the same effect with a studio recording, a MySpace account and some fliers. Kids who hear about you are instantly able to see what you have to offer and decide if you're worth paying the cover charge. The ability to raise their own profile allows artists to be independent of the marketing machine that is the RIAA.

Take heart, the musician isn't threatened by piracy, the middleman is. And that's what truly terrifies the RIAA.