The web has made it far easier to promote and profit from music. So much so that it’s now possible for bands to succeed in a big way without having the big finances and professional experience of a record label behind them. This is great news for bands starting up in the music business, but it doesn’t mean that success is going to happen by itself, overnight.

The reasons that record labels have lost ground over the last few years are many: most important was their unwillingness to embrace digital as the future of music retail, but the fact that online media also made it easier for musicians to look after the business of running their career for themselves.

Not having people from a label looking after promotion, gig booking, logistics, merchandising and the many other things that go together to make a band successful does mean that you don’t have to pay for that work, but it does mean that you’ve got to do it yourself.

Don’t be put off – the rewards are there, and they’re greater and closer than ever before. It’s just that to get to them you’ve got to be creative, dedicated, willing and most of all, more smart and cunning than the lovechild of Machiavelli and a fox with a master’s in cunning from Oxford university of Cunning.