The Digital Music Forum was last week in New York, and there have been a lot of articles with thought-provoking quotes from the panelists. Here's a sampling of what was written. And Coolfer should note that the tech sites are way ahead of the music sites in covering the news, as is usually the case in issues where music and technology overlap.

• "Students Shirk Legal Downloads" at Red Herring. "Michael Weiss, chief executive of StreamCast Networks, which runs the peer-to-peer service Morpheus, a frequent RIAA target, said his company had polled students about how much they would be willing to pay for music and found an unwillingness to pay at all."

• "Music publishers are restricting online growth - DiMA" at PC Pro. "Jonathan Potter, director of DiMA, the Digital Media Association, said that unless publishers accept a smaller share of the digital music pie for songwriters, the online services will not be able to cut prices in order to better compete with the 'free' music available on p2p file sharing networks."

• "Cell Phones That Play MP3s A Hot Topic At Digital Music Forum" at NY1. Larry Kenswil of Universal Music Group: "I think more and more phones are coming out with broadband capability, 3G phones, and a lot of them now you can download entire songs, not just ring tones, and there's huge growth in that market. Like everything, no one knows how much people want, but there's certainly going to be plenty of things for people to get if they want it. The convergence of the mobile device with the music player and the television set and the whole online world is what's happening this year.”

• "MySpace man says their CD was 'shitty'" at Drowned in Sound. "Gold told the Digital Music Forum that MySpace Volume 1 had only sold a maximum of 50,000 copies, a pretty poor return considering just how many people were made aware of it through the multi-million-person reaching MySpace."

• "Digital Formats Continue to Bless Indie Labels, Artists" at Digital Music News. "David Pakman, head of independent online retailer eMusic, pegged the independent sector at a 27 percent market-share in the US, a figure that factors in major label distribution arrangements. Pakman noted that the independent sector is "the only area that is growing in terms of revenue and market share," while observing that the 'independent artist has always been afforded advantages online that he has not been given in a traditional retail environment'."