This example comes from the music business, where Amazon is working with a smaller vendor to shove the big labels aside - but it's happening across the entire economy. People who previously added value by standing in the middle of transactions are being relentlessly kicked aside. This is a wave you want to get in front of, so that you don't get run over by it...

Tunecore will charge just $31 a year in upfront fees to handle a 10-track CD from pressing to delivery, passing all other costs through to the buyer. In other words, the service promises to remove nearly all of the risks of short-run CD manufacturing, which can cost musicians hundreds or even thousands of dollars for discs that rarely sell enough to cover expenses.

Those older costs supported a ton of people who happily shaved a few bucks of profit off the work of the artists - but that's coming to an end. It's not the only place, either. I rather suspect that the entire sales field is going to get massively shrunk in the next few years...

Technorati Tags: disintermediation, sales