“Challenges and opportunities in the music business”… but left with the impression that all the industry wants to talk about are challenges.

Clearly, the music industry has to face daily major trends like:

Today, the emergence of digital distribution is construed as the saving platform for the industry, but no matter how rosy its growth is, it cannot counteract the major underlying fact: people are listening to less music and are less willing to pay for it.

It was mentioned that 95% of music sales are still done in the “old fashioned” physical CD way.
’s post on how 2005 was the worst year ever for the industry at the “Future of Music” blog), and it appears to be a race to the bottom of a price war. Already, retailers like Tower Records on the verge of bankruptcy.

The quote of the day goes to Franc Carreras (Director of Marketing & Operations at RCA Music Group), who made the music industry position clear:

If you are in a sinking boat your first reaction is not to jump to the water — you first try to plug the hole, and keep trying until the sinking is inevitable.

I agree, the music industry is sinking, and music lovers and industry junior staff know very well what is happening. Unfortunately, the CEOs in the boardroom are not willing to risk their core business model in a gamble. That is why they like DRM, walled gardens and multiple incompatible formats. How long until they face the inevitable and truly try to follow users in providing microchunked content(as Fred Wilson says) that can be downloaded anytime, anywhere, on any device, at a reasonable price?

The panel also discussed some Web 2.0 themes, such as:”will online collaborative filtering replace the filtering work that record scouts and marketing staff do?”
Pandora or Last.fm, showing once more that us bloggers do not live in the real world of mass-market adoption

The full panel included:

The event was kindly hosted by Aydin Caginalp – Partner, Alston & Bird LLP and organized by the Columbia MBA alumni club.