US major label execs were reportedly downbeat at an industry seminar, Music 2.0, held in West Hollywood yesterday. Although George White, a Senior VP at Warner, seemed optimistic about the chances of the growing digital sector eventually compensating for the decline in CD sales, most other delegates didn't seem to share his opinion.
David Ring of Universal's eLabs division said: "There is a lot of concern about CD sales dropping off a cliff at some point, and digital potentially not being able to grow fast enough to offset that". While he agreed that digital sales were growing and that "we do have a business that we didn't have four years ago", he added that digital was simply grabbing an increasing percentage of a "shrinking pie".
Music attorney Fred Goldring, who shared Ring's pessimism, said he thought that P2P remained the biggest problem for the record industry, and that therefore the solution wasn't hoping that track sales via iTunes style download platforms would boom, but rather finding a workable way of licensing legit P2P operations. He said: "Peer-to-peer file-sharing continues to plague the business, but record labels must find a way to monetise the P2P world instead of focusing too heavily on digital downloads. There is a real disconnect today with the labels - there are more people consuming music today than at any other time. We need to put a dollar value on all the file sharing that is going on. Until the labels wake up and find a way to create an ASCAP-BMI-type license around all of the file-sharing in the same way that the industry monetises consumption on mediums like radio - that's when this business will start to come alive again".