A great deal of what's written about music covers the "how" and "what" but not the "why".

"What do you need to look at in your contract?" "What marketing should you do?"

One of the design goals of whyisthemusicindustrysofullof.com is to try to look at why the music industry is so endlessly antagonistic - "why was your original contract so unfair in the first place?" "You're sending CDs to labels and promoters; why are they ignoring them?"

So these two pieces by Derek Sivers, who founded and has now sold CD Baby, are in tune with the approach.

According to WIRED, Sivers distributed "4.6 million CDs from independent bands through online music stores in the past ten years, disbursing over $84 million directly to bands with nary a middleman in sight".

Here's a WIRED interview on what he views as the biggest challenge for musicians to earn a living: "Creating the music is easy (though still underrated). Distributing the music is so easy it's moot. So now the delicate art of calling attention to your music means everything. Marketing is distribution."

Conveniently, and this is the particularly useful piece, he's also written a guide to marketing music for the beginner (PDF, and you have to register to download).