Germany's music business - the third largest in the world - is nicht sehr gut, or something like that. In fact, according to the boss of Universal Music Germany, it is "in the state of a zombie".
Speaking to the BBC World Service's Music Biz programme, Tim Renner said his country's music industry was struggling to survive because key players had failed to accept the "new realties"
of the download age. Renner told the programme: "The problem the music industry has got is that they aren't willing to accept that the classic way of doing business is over and out. So the music industry in its current form over here is pretty much in the state of a zombie."
Renner was responding to the fact music sales in Germany have been in decline ever since 2000 - with album sales falling by 13.7% between 2002 and 2003, and to research that shows that more than twice as many CDRs are filled with tracks by music fans than CD albums are sold by record shops.
However,
Peter Zombic of the German division of the International Federation of Phonographic Industry was less damning. He said: "It's quite true that we have severe problems in Germany - but that's true in other parts of the world and in most developed markets too. I don't agree that the music industry lost control over the music market - in fact, especially in regard to German talent, the market is quite successful. And we were the first to implement a download service back in 1997 - although at that time it was not successful, because of the advent of piracy, it was the
Napster time, when P2P services became popular."
Zombic said that the German music industry should follow moves in the
US and elsewhere to change public perception towards the private copying of music. "There is a widespread attitude that private copying is a hobby, it's nice, it's fun. We try to make clear it's not nice and it's not fun - it's endangering the creativity in our country."