I'm at the Music 2.0 conference in Los Angeles. Today I moderated a great panel discussion on marketing to Generation Y. Before that I caught a few speakers. One was Larry Kenswil, president of Univeral Music Group's eLabs. I took some loose notes on a notepad -- didn't have the laptop out at the time. (Digital Music News has a report on the first panel of the day, a sour discussion on the new music industry.)

After going through some statistics on digital purchasing and P2P usage, Kenswil got into a few more interesting topics. I was struck by how his comments showed how his comments are so far from public and digirati opinion. One topic was a key theme of the last year or so, DRM. Kenswil framed DRM as more of a non-issue than an issue, a rallying cry from a small minority rather than a concern of Middle America. iTunes users aren't asking for it, he said. "Apple's retail competitors, they're definitely asking for it."

"Subscription is a huge disappointment," Kenswil said flatly of the model that once held much promise -- and still holds promise in the minds of many. There's huge upside, he said, because the lack of ownership results in repeated revenues for content owners as songs are played repeatedly.

On the issue of the MP3 format, Kenswil called for experiments rather than full submersion. "How about testing if first?" he proposed. But he pointed to equipment with no copy controls and the risk of unintended consequences. "There would be no turning back," he said of a jump to MP3, adding that things may go that route but people need to be aware of the results. He threw out a scenario in which a market could be created for second-hand MP3s.

In comparison to the first panel, Kenswil painted a frank yet sometimes opimistic picture of an industry in flux. His comments were pretty much par for the course. There was no inspired vision of the future, but I had the feeling that this Kenswil is open to the change that will come.