Can you imagine a person trying to accomplish anything without having a phone number to receive calls, or access to a phone to make calls?

Today, the computer is what a phone used to be, the internet (or web) are the phone lines, and your web site plus e-mail are your phone numbers. As amazing as it may sound, today an independent artist can have her/his own professional promotion TV show running day and night non stop on the world's stage, complete with a professional store to sell CDs or tunes, and message boards for announcements and communication with existing and potential audience.

It is always open and available instantly to anyone in the world interested in learning about the artist, listening to the artist's music, communicating with the artist, or purchasing albums or tunes from the artist even while the artist is busy in the studio making more music without knowing that a fan in China is buying a CD.

Now imagine this wonderful setup at a monthly cost of about that of a phone line at home, plus initial equipment cost of about that of a living room stereo system, and to top it off, the artist maintains her/his complete autonomy over every aspect of the career without having to sell her/his soul to the music industry.

This is not a prediction. It is a reality. With current fast internet connection rates, and hosting like Yahoo's Geocities Pro with about 250,000 visitors per month, space for about 1500 tunes plus many web pages, and the latest tools for site development, all for less than $9 per month, the amazing scenario describe above could not be more real.

The new generation of independent artists is already taking advantage of this reality. They are now going beyond using MySpace or SoundClick for audio streaming, CDBaby for CDs selling, and iTunes for tunes selling. It's the new breed of independent artists that are getting away from having their music spread all over the place, by taking control and keeping all their assets in their own web site.

With this new generation of artists, comes a new generation of websites like CFTA that encourages artists to store their music on their own site and take advantage of the free services CFTA provides for independent artists. CFTA emphasizes that the artist's tunes as digital audio files are the artist's most valuable asset, and should be stored on the artist music site in a stable location where the file names and location will not change.

This allows CFTA to provide artists with valuable free services like a private tunes download store, and also goes a long way for the artist