More cogitation on power law, this time as regards to the music business by Tim Oren. My head may explode from all of this analytical thinking.

So, why can't the big dogs just go away and leave the little guys and us customers alone? Or even try the trick themselves? They aren't ignorant of the possibilities. A few of the words I omitted from Mr. Urie's earlier quote:
"Suppose you could reach those people just with the touch of a button? You could hit those 100,000 - 200,000 people. That is an incredible efficiency of marketing. I believe that the record label of the future will have 20 or 30 artists on its roster who are just like that, artists who sell a quarter of a million records to an established fan base. But whereas now they are so-so money makers, in the future they will be the financial core of the label because you?ll be able to market them so efficiently and they'll have an avid fan base that you can count on. That's my vision of the future."

There are two reasons he won't be able to do it. The first is channel conflict. Mr. Urie again:

[Remember a customer for him is a big retail distributor.] "...competing with our customers, I think that's a valid concern. Our directive coming from ... Universal's Vice Chairman is that, 'We are not retailers.' And I sat in a meeting where he told Best Buy that, in exactly those words: 'We are not retailers, we do not want to be retailers.' So everything we have done, such as digital downloading - now that we're beginning to have conversations about subscription services, is going to be through the customer. If we finally get to the point where the subscription model works, we will offer that through our customer base, through their Web sites, to their customers, and they'll have a piece of that action."
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