Totally agree. Pumeco, do you realize how many digital albums and songs I and others have bought from independent artists from indie and their own websites because they have been shut out of physical formats and the entertainment industry? Also you realize those formats are a way for these artists to get their music out there when there is no other venue for the physical content? Also you realize the mark up on if I wanted to get a CD from an artist in another country versus getting the digital version? Also I've not seen these restrictions on content where I've loaded my own content stripped from my CDs and loaded on an ipod, or old tv episodes I've ripped from DVDs to watch on planes. If there is any restrictions, they come from the movie and TV industry themselves, the digital format was a way for these artists to get around that. Pumeco, I'm not sure what interweb links you're using for your information, but it sounds  like you need to delete those links because they're making you look bad regurgitating that information.

I personally know several indie musicians who only sell their music on their own and avoid publishers. And were it not for the internet and digital formats, it simply wouldn't be possible. Even if they were able to afford the cost of producing physical copies on their own, they wouldn't have the means to distribute those copies on such a wide scale without a middle-man publisher, who will take most of the profit for themselves, which is why these indie artists choose to go it on their own to begin with, and choose to sell digital instead of physical, in order to keep their own costs down and receive a higher percentage of each sale. They're also not bound by contracts and they aren't being required to record the next manufactured top 40's crap just to keep their contracts or rights to their own work. They're able to produce the music they want to produce. If you really want to support a musician, especially those who are bound by corporate contracts - the best way is to buy tickets to their shows, because just buying their albums puts very little if any money in their pocket directly. Most of the cost of that record or cd or tape goes to the publisher, not the artist. Unless the artist is also his own publisher. And authors are the same. They're able to write the stories they want to write, instead of the story their agent or publisher tells them they have to write, or modify it because it's not what that publisher thinks will sell, or they think it's too graphic, too taboo, etc. Digital publishing frees them from all of that, and they don't get ripped off paying some vanity press tens of thousands of dollars for paper books that will just sit in their garage for the next 20 years growing insects and mold. And it saves resources - which this planet is quickly running out of as the population increases. Digital books do not require deforestation. Digital music doesn't pollute our water or kill or displace wild life populations. Unlike paper and plastic, kilobytes are not a finite resource.