This morning’s NYT Sunday Mag piece on singer/songwriter Katell Keineg starts out promising ““ “[She] is trying to figure out what it means ““ in today’s music business ““ to be really on your own,”� says the headline. The template arranged itself in my head before I hit the first paragraph ““ critically acclaimed musician drops out of the major label system, starts releasing their own material and gigging all over the place, builds up a strong grass-roots following and ends up thriving on her own terms.

But her story is not heartwarming, nor is it all that new.

Back in the "˜90s, Keineg played small clubs in Dublin with the likes of Jeff Buckley and David Gray, and opened up for U2 and Natalie Merchant. Critics and major label A&R pegged her as the next Tracy Chapman. She signed a multi-album deal with Elektra, but her supporters at the label left the company before the release of her first LP, leaving her with little marketing support. She was promptly filed under "Lilith Fair"� and more or less ignored. After two more albums she let the contract wither and die. Now she gigs frequently around the world and continues to draw small but fanatical crowds wherever she goes, but she is also perennially broke, borrowing studio time and instruments to piece together another album, and has no label, no agent, no manager.

Although the article sells itself as a story about "today's music business,"� Keineg's problems seem pretty old-school to me. She was the victim of ham-fisted major label marketing, feckless managers and agents, and her own rather self-defeating refusal to make artistic compromises or to allow herself to be defined or marketed. (She had to be cajoled into having a fashion photographer take this relatively ordinary photo for one of her albums.)

These are all real problems, but they're the problems of yesterday's music business. What the article doesn't really get into is that today's music business "“ the one with iTunes and Emusic and MySpace and YouTube and CD Baby and cheap recording gear and fan-organized "house concerts"� "“ is practically custom-built for artists like Keineg. She can record her music exactly as she likes in her Dublin flat, package it up physically or digitally and release it worldwide, with minimal to zero major label involvement and hence few opportunities for artistic compromise. So why isn't she? She's certainly not lacking in potential "“ her music has very broad appeal, particularly to the type that buys their CDs at Starbucks, and her live performances leave audiences speechless.

She is taking baby steps in that direction. A couple of her albums are on the Emusic indie download site, and the article notes that some of her catalog will make it onto iTunes soon. She's got a fan-maintained MySpace profile and a small and infrequently updated Web site, which is now out of commission after Times readers overloaded it with hits this morning.

In the story, reporter Darcy Frey notes that Keineg could certainly put in a little more effort:

"Her aversion to the business end of the musical enterprise has also led to a certain indifference to the demands of managing a career. "˜To do this kind of thing, you have to have the goal and work steadily toward it over the months "¦ there's a big difference between that and a person who needs all her energy just to get out of bed in the morning!'"�

So if she's not motivated to do all these things herself, what she really needs is probably the one remaining piece of the old-school industry machine that still has any value: management. She, like many talented musicians, lacks the discipline and instinct for self-promotion and entrepreneurship that it takes to thrive in a music business where it is no longer useful or profitable to just write your songs and let the system do the rest of the work.

This is a tricky problem, because great managers are as rare as hen's teeth "“ especially ones who not only understand the artist's needs and temperament but also have the proper ratios of intelligence to shrewdness to motivation it takes to actually make things happen for the artists in their care. (There's a whole "˜nother blog post, perhaps even a book, to be written about the plague of mediocrity in artist management.)

It will be interesting to see what happens to Keineg's career in the weeks and months following the Times piece. Will she see a huge spike in sales on Emusic and iTunes and Amazon.com, a few hundred new MySpace friends and even bigger crowds at her gigs? Will she give in and perhaps take some of those TV, film and commercial licensing offers, if they fit right? Will another major label come calling to draw her back into the comfortable old-school music machine? Or will she seize the opportunity and turn this sudden interest in her music into a revitalized career as an indie musician, on her own terms?