One guy on Twitter recently posted an interesting question. Actually, it was more of a statement. He said, “Who in their right mind would want to be a musician in this environment?” I though to myself, who wouldn’t? I think there’s no better time to be an indie music artist than right now.

Obviously, the thrust of this guy’s question was that a music career isn’t lucrative anymore. I say, but it was never lucrative to begin with. Sure, a few people became megastars and made millions, but what about everyone else? You were lucky if the labels even paid attention to you. And if they did and you happened to get signed, you were extra lucky if you didn’t get totally screwed. At least now, everyone has a shot at making a decent living in music if they put enough effort into it.

Clearly, the author of that tweet isn’t a real indie music person. There’s an interesting anecdote about a magazine editor who asks a millionaire investor why he keeps doing what he does. The editor asks, “You’ve already made millions. Why do you keep risking your money and time trying to make more? I would have quit after I made my first million.” The investor responds, “That’s exactly why you would never make a million.”

The point is that you do something because you love it, not because you care about the money. If you love it, you’ll do it well. And if you do it well, the money will come. Maybe it won’t make you rich, but at least you’ll be doing what you love.

You know what the best part of it all is? If you are a real music person, economics and popular culture are on your side. Pop culture killed Top 40 Radio. In 2005, an average of one U.S radio station went out of business each week. I love the very idea that when Kanye West releases his new single on the radio, nobody really cares.

On March 21, 2000 Jive Records released “No Strings Attached,” the second album by NSYNC. It sold 2.4 million in its first week, making it the fastest selling album ever. That was only eight years ago. My, my, how the world has changed. Now people are exchanging tens of millions of songs on the P2P networks instead. The vast majority of them aren’t top hits. Some of them might be yours. Hopefully.

It wasn’t so much that file sharing made us stop buying music, but that file sharing exposed us to the vast universe of music out there that nobody knew about. The notion that file sharing killed the music industry because it made people stop buying top hits is one of the most persistent myths out there.

Case in point: the other day, I’m typing something up at my computer. And as I’m typing, I’m listening to a song by a New Jersey based band called A Little Affair, which I wrote up a review for recently. Even though they have areas where they could improve, I think their tracks are kinda’ chill. I wasn’t listening to Coldplay or 50 or The Smashing Pumpkins. I was listening to A Little Affair. Why? Because I could.

The Top 40 era is coming to a close, and music is more popular than ever, not less. Take it from Rupert Murdoch. In a 2005 speech he said, “Young people don’t want to rely on a God like figure from above to tell them what’s important. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.”

Their media is your opportunity. Forget the naysayers. If music is your calling, do it. Do it because you love it.

There’s a HUGE disconnect somewhere. Everywhere I went in July 2009 somebody was talking to me about Michael Jackson. It’s died down now but for a while, I was hearing about the tremendous surge in album sales after his death. All of a sudden, there were all these numnuts at places like CNN, SKY and the BBC analyzing every aspect of Michael Jackson’s life to fill up dead time. Everybody all of a sudden was a Michael Jackson expert and acted like they cared about him. It’s like he was the soundtrack to everybody’s life. I say, where were you 10 years ago?

If you loved him so much, why weren’t you buying his albums? This whole Michael Jackson thing reveals a lot about people. It really reveals what types of people there are in this world. A lot of people have talked to me about their feelings towards MJ’s death. I’ve begun noticing a pattern.

On one side are the people who are totally affected by his death. One girl I spoke to the day after he died had just finished crying when she came up to me. She felt devastated. On the other side are the people who acknowledge his death and feel bad for the kids and family, but aren’t all that emotionally vested in all the MJ brouhaha. What I’ve noticed is that the people who are all caught up in the MJ saga usually don’t have much going on in their lives. They’re usually not creative, original, ambitious types of people who produce useful things for society. They’re usually consumers. The people who come home every day from their 9-5 jobs and plop down on the couch to watch reality TV.

The people who aren’t really caught up in the MJ stuff are usually people who are doing things with their lives. They’re too busy to sob over his death. These weren’t the people swarming around the Staples Center to catch a last glimpse of the King. They were at home or at their places of business creat ng things for the rest of us. Things like music, Things like new web apps. Things like new vaccines for people in poor countries.

But the consumers are always far more numerous. Granted, there’s a bit of consumer in all of us, but the hardcore consumers always outnumber the hardcore producers.

This brings me back to the first line of this article. There’s a disconnect somewhere. I checked out a clip of “Billie Jean” on YouTube. It had 22,859, 150 views and close to 90,000 comments. And most of the comments I looked at were heavy. People expressing profound love for the man.

But the views on YouTube don’t square with MJ’s post-death album sales. Through July 5, for example, the King of Pop sold an unremarkable 422,000 albums, Now, that may sound like a lot, but we’re talking about MJ here. We’re talking about a man who had 19 Grammys, 22 American Music Awards, 12 World Music Awards, and was named artist of the decade, generation, century and millennium. And not just that, but of that 422,000, about 225,000 were digital sales.

The real killer though is that he sold 2.3 million individual tracks. So the moral of the story isn’t just, “Forget CDs!” It’s that the market has changed profoundly. People are cherry picking what they want to listen to and put on their iPods. And they’re using the Internet and sites like YouTube as filters.

What does this mean for indie music artists? It means that you need to shift away from making albums and instead make singles for your core. People don’t want albums anymore. Albums are based on the bundling concept. People don’t really want bundles anymore. So stop basing your revenue strategy on bundling. Few people have the time or desire to consume bundled media. I don’t buy CDs. I don’t subscribe to any magazines. I get everything online, where I can pick and choose what’s good. I’m sure you do the same. So what makes you think your fans aren’t the same?

The Web has irreversibly segmented the world. Focus on high impact singles, shows and merch. And execute it creatively.