What middlemen in any transaction usually provide is a pre-existing customer base and fulfillment. In the past you could arrange to purchase your novels, magazines, newspapers, whatever, directly from the creators, with each setting up a long distance financial arrangement ... or you could go into the local bookstore and buy it there.

In some cases, such as film or broadcast, the middleman is providing the venue. Not every creator can afford their own broadcast tower and transmitter and few people own their own 35mm projector.

Of course, now times are changing, and many people do own the modern digital equivalent of all those things, and many authors do have their own distribution and marketing channels.

Middlemen still provide a pre-existing financial arrangement. As a consumer I don't really want to set up a credit card account with every fly-by-night operation on the internet that I might want to purchase from. So places like Apple and Amazon and Paypal still have a place.

And in the international marketplace, especially in media sales, local licensors often provide the value of localization. Subtitles, dubbing, translation, etc.

It's only been 10 - 15 years since significant numbers of people have been able to purchase stuff online, and there are still issues with bandwidth for some media. The world is changing and adapting to the new normal.

Congratulations, you are living through an important period of history. Expect some bumps, inconvenience and inefficiencies while humanity readjusts to a couple of thousand years of dealing with physical media.

You just described middlemen in general and didn't explain how these music publishing middlemen still add value.

Thanks - it wasn't clear who the middlemen were : The uncooperative website, someone distributing to the website, the music publisher, the artist's agents, etc...

He wrote at length about it here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...