Scott Cohen presents…

I was unexpectedly at Futuresonic in Manchester on Thursday, and I’m pretty glad it worked out that way. I can’t recommend strongly enough that if you get the chance to go to this sort of thing, that you make the most of it. Attending seminars and conferences is how you’ll get that one little bit of knowledge or insight that’ll give you the edge you need. It also means you can strike up a conversation with whoever’s presenting and pick their brains.

You’re probably aware that I attend a lot of these sort of things as a speaker. I try and get to as many as I possibly can as an attendee as well. It can be invaluable stuff and I always learn a lot.

In this instance, there were some really great people there, and some interesting talks — particularly the session on social music.

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So I didn’t quite get to Chicago yesterday. You may recall that I “won” a trip to attend a blogging conference. Well, I missed my flight. And since I was in Manchester for an extra day, I went along to Futuresonic, which seemed a pretty good use of my time.

The conference was interesting. If I wasn’t heading to the States, I’d have loved to have stayed and attended more sessions. Bigwigs from Last.fm, The Orchard, Dopplr and a bunch of other organisations were in attendance, as was my ‘nemesis’, Swiss media futurist Gerd Leonhard.

Gerd and I have had debates online in the past. At first, my problem concerned the very nature of what he purports to do. It’s like he’s selling himself as a music business fortune teller. I’m automatically distrustful of people who start a sentence “In the future, we will all…” — because a) it’s entirely speculative and unprovable; b) it’s bumper-sticker thinking; and c) it’s always wrong and usually unhelpful.

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When things are new, and people are making a name for themselves by making bold assertions that sound futuristic, doom-laden or revolutionary, sometimes they fall into the trap of talking nonsense.

“CDs are dead!” is one example of this phenomenon.

Think about it. Does it really look like the CD is dead? Or even particularly struggling? Sales of mass-produced, commercially released popular music CDs are declining (though hardly dwindling to zero as some self-professed prophets of the digital age are trying to make us think), but the CD itself is alive and well. Thriving, actually.

I’ll explain.

When we talk about the CD, we’re usually talking about CDs for sale in high street shops. When I say ‘we’, I mean ‘the mainstream media’, and when I say ‘the mainstream media’, I generally mean ‘articles that have largely been cut and paste from press releases issued by the major record labels’.

But a step back reveals a much richer and more diverse picture - in which the CD is not only alive and well, but is making a concerted attempt at taking over my house, and probably yours too.

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I get asked this question quite a lot by two distinct groups of people. One is the retailers themselves. The other is the group of people passionate about independent music stores. The customers.

And therein lies the answer to the question and the solution to the problem: there exist the requisite two groups of people required in order for the answer to be a resounding YES!

Independent record retailers want to survive. Their customers want them to survive. Both groups are invested in the outcome to the current challenges.

I was interviewed for an article in Business Week about this very issue, and the ways in which New York store Other Music (a shop I really love) are coping with the transition to the online environment. And there’s a single, simple solution to their success.

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