At the In The City music industry conference in London, panelists debated prolonging the life of the CD, the re-emergence of vinyl and that pesky value gap (that we've been hearing a bit about recently).

Tommy Boy Records' Tom Silverman thought the CD's life support system has gone on long enough: "Silverman said he'd lambasted his fellow RIAA board members for prolonging the life of the CD, and not being more forward looking. The CD had given them a short-term revenue boost, raising the price of the album from $8-$10 to $14-16 as the format switched from vinyl and cassette to CD. The good old days weren't coming back. While all three retailers were optimistic - Silverman thought things were so bad that even cautious optimism was unwarranted."

The concept -- it's too far from reality to call an actual plan -- of the blanket license was a topic that split the panelists. The Orchard founder Scott Cohen and DrownedInSound.com's Sean Adams called for blanket licenses on ISP and mobile customers. (Quick question: Telecom companies...they have pretty good lobbyists, right?) Cohen's fictitious numbers: "If they paid just $1 a month they don't know, we have 1.1 billion ISP customers and 2.6 billion mobile customers, giving us $45 billion overnight to be divided up."

Jupiter's Mark Mulligan insisted the numbers do not add up. "In the UK, he pointed out, just 15 per cent of internet users, and therefore something around 12 per cent of the population were using P2P file sharing. And these are often users with the lowest disposable income. Yet the industry has seen a 30 per cent decline in revenues." Of course there are other reasons. Here's a simple math problem: One explanation could be that the 12% of the UK's population that uses P2P used to buy a disproportionately large amount of music. There's no need to assume each 1% of the population accounts for 1% of music sales. Beyond that, the unbundled album is a problem. Consumers are swapping albums for songs and labels sorely miss that forgone revenue. They obviously don't miss it enough to put their weight behind a P2P scenario. That's going to be the last option. Next up: Total Music.