Intriguing disconnect from my panel at Digital Music Forum East this morning. Amidst the usual — is it, what, 10 years now? — running whine-fest about the major labels vs. the start-ups, I asked some of the New New Thing social media start-ups what they could offer to a label or music management company or artist who had $40K to spend on marketing.

Their answer: nothing.

Fellas, the definition of a media business is somebody who matches up content, audience, and marketer. This is a (dying?) industry that desperately needs to cut costs in A&R and marketing to survive. And the online is the most promising music marketing medium ever.

You might want to invest in creating services and tools that marketers could make use of. Let me assure you MySpace, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL are doing so, even if their music coolth is warming. Not so sure Facebook is. Yet. And, for the moment, Apple appears to be blowing this opportunity. So hop to it.