The sweet spot in the middle

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, events march onward.

Tim Oren has some useful modeling observations on media and business models.

Now it's time to drop the pose. I actually believe the most interesting territory is in the mid-market, both in music and other media. The terrain of foothills and coast ranges, newly exposed as the Internet drains out the water of fixed costs. We may also surmise that the 'net reduces the costs of building new hills, as word-of-mouth and focused advertising augment or supplant conventional PR and promotion. To borrow an ecological metaphor, there are a lot of niches being opened as the water drops. Many that the BigCo peak dwellers may be ill-adapted to exploit. That's where I want to go next.

Find the niches and exploit them in ways that the BigCo's can't do easily and the smaller companies don't have the resources to reach (or in a shifting landscape, in a place that no one has noticed).