it's survival. every person at every physical distributor is watching the death pool. every year in march I think, this is year physical product is finally, completely over - but it keeps hanging on...
warner folded ryko into ada, next step is folding ada into wmg.
emi already folded caroline into the parent co.
uni already folded fontana into the parent co.
sony's red division is hanging tough and no doubt the IAODA move is about transferring bodies, eventually, it seems obvious - most of Red will be folded into parent Sony(BMG).
the orchard was the first real digital aggregation service and probably has the single largest marketshare outside of the majors
the play in digital distribution will be to upsell services like marketing,
PR, consultation, webdesign, etc - as anyone could go to tunecore or the like on their own.
Discmakers purchase of CDBaby is also an interesting play and ironically, Discmakers may survive in the long run as a boutique business of 20th Century antiques known as Compact Discs...
as the Chinese say, "May You Live In Interesting Times"...