I think there are some good ideas out there. Trying to incorproate them all would be a difficult mission to say the least.
I would just like to clear some things up.
1: DRM will allow you to copy your song to an mp3 player and burn it to an audio CD 10 times each. Thats 20 times you can take it from your pc with you. How many times do you plan to lose your CD's? The labels are not keen to authorize wma (not mp3 by the way) music files because someone pays his $1, downloads the track and gives it free of charge to all his buddies. Maybe they do take a bigger cut and the artist gets 1% but then sign with other lables that are more progressive in their thinking (but thats another topic).
2: It would be impossible to offer files in every format available. At the moment wma files (I know, down with microsoft, etc, etc - thats another forum) are what we've been investigating.
3: There would be a quality control process for independant artists - in fact we could probably pay somebody to help us out with this. Anybody wanna listen to free trance and get paid for it?
4: Cash wise we're just party goers like you guys and are looking to spread the reach of some the kick ass music we've all danced/tripped to. The site will start small but the more support we get the easier it would be to convince more labels of its usefullness to them.
5: It will be a community shop on the web, not some iTunes corporation. We're just 2 guys who dig the music.
6: How many of you guys have heard South African psytrance? I would think probably not many and this is my point - what kick ass music from South Africa, Australia, Thailand, Brazil, etc are you missing because the artist doesn't have the resources to print 50 000 CD's and distribute around the world.