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Hey, Mr. Music Executive: scrap your preoccupation with CD sales and start looking for ways to help people share, yes share music; focus more on developing and profiting from artists; and forget about subscription services and ad-supported music.

These are the conclusions of James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst, according to a report titled "The End Of The Music Industry As We Know It," issued on Tuesday.

That's a fitting title because the report reads like an obituary. Tower Records, a music mecca for decades, has already closed but McQuivey argues the real deathblow to the industry will come when Wal-Mart Stores, Best Buy, and other large retailers begin scaling back shelf space for CDs.

"This move will permanently signal the end of the music business as it was once known," McQuivey wrote. "From that point on, more music will be sold digitally than on CD, reducing CD sales to just $3.8 billion in 2012."

McQuivey, a former professor at Boston University, tells record executives to cheer up because there are ways to rise from the ashes. He says first, the industry should quit fooling around with music subscriptions and ad-supported models. People want to own their music and downloads have won. Only 7 percent of adults on the Web say they have ever tried a subscription service, according to the report.

The analyst also sent a message to ad-supported music services, such as SpiralFrog and Qtrax. The ad-supported model should stay "on the radio where it belongs," he said in his report. Social networks are better places for selling ads against music, and they also allow users to share songs virally.

McQuivey's finding here was particularly timely. Over the weekend, PaidContent reported that MySpace is in talks with the four top labels about launching a jointly operated, ad-supported music service.

Sharing is vital, according to McQuivey, because it makes new music discovery easier, which the Web was supposed to help with but so far has tanked. In this effort, he sends a special shout out to Slacker, a personal online-radio service.

"The gold medal for 2007 (in music discovery) should have gone to Slacker," McQuivey wrote. "(The) portable device provides instant access to radio-formatted music that can easily convert to a digital download with the click of a button. This model combines the simplicity of the radio experience with the power of music ownership."

When it comes to artists, the labels should focus more broadly on a musician's career, including merchandise and concerts, as well as recordings. He said it's the artists, not the CDs that are the music industry's true product.

In a final note, McQuivey suggests that music artists, who have historically looked down their noses at advertising, had better change. He says the industry should rip a page out of NASCAR's playbook.

"Artists who used to pretend that their platinum album success was really about their "art" will no longer have that luxurious pretense because labels won't sign them unless they agree to a barrage of sponsorship opportunities," McQuivey wrote. "There will eventually come a day when Chips Ahoy will contend with the Keebler Elves over who can be the official cookie of the Taylor Swift world tour."

Forrester just released a report that should be required reading for enterprise software vendors who insist on inflicting the 20th century on their customers. According to Forrester, "software licensing and pricing continues to be marred by complexity, soaring maintenance costs, and a lack of flexibility and alignment with business goals."

In the French version of the synopsis, Forrester gives even more detail. For those of us who compete with these bloatware kings, this isn't news. But for enterprises who haven't been on a buying spree lately, you're in for a rude awakening:

Twelve percent of Americans are willing to pay more for greener electronics, according to a Forrester Research survey of 5,000 people. The study forecast that electronics companies will learn to target this segment of the population, equivalent to 25 million consumers.

The report broke down shoppers into three categories: "bright" green, green, and un-green. Another 41 percent may care about environmental woes, but not enough to pay more for greener gadgets, while green issues were of little or no concern to another 47 percent of people surveyed.

"Bright" green consumers are otherwise known by the marketing acronym LOHAS, which stands for Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability. Generally well-off, well-read and particular about what they buy, their predecessors include those who may have bought tofu from a "health food store" before Whole Foods ushered in an era of eco-supermarkets and Wal-Mart stocked organic broccoli.

However, in electronics there is no equivalent green brand to Whole Foods. Green labels on gadgets are not prominent, and products made by companies with ecologically aware practices generally don't cost more than others. People interested in buying more efficient products will see the EnergyStar seal on products. EPEAT ratings of energy-efficient electronics, on the other hand, do not mark goods in stores.

Electronics with EPEAT ratings don't usually cost more than others.

(Credit: EPEAT)

The latest Greenpeace guide to greener electronics, released quarterly since August 2006, gave low marks last week to Nintendo, Philips and Microsoft. Apple, long the target of a Greenpeace campaign, improved its ranking. LG Electronics, HP and Sony also made significant gains in the environmental watchdog's rankings.

My CTO just received word of a bug that had been found by an important customer of ours and resolved earlier today...via Facebook. Another business partner looked up my profile (in Facebook) to figure out how best to interact with me in a contract negotiation. (He stopped short of humming The Smiths but that might have helped his cause.) :-) Also today, an old friend from my master's program sent me a message (on Facebook) to ask about my company's content management solution for his organization.

Perhaps this is why Forrester's Kyle McNabb writes:

Face it, without an ability to dictate what technology their employees use to get their jobs done, organizations have to shift their ECM (enterprise content management) focus from repositories to figuring out how to extend the security and management of content beyond the repository, and onto the content asset. You'll soon have to work on answering questions of 'How do we make sure our people can work in Facebook, but not take contracts in there that may put us at risk?'

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David Armano from Critical Mass will moderate a panel on "Always in Beta: How Big Business Can Benefit from 'Little' Innovation" at the Forrester Consumer Forum (October 10 to 13). Here's a quick synopsis: "Innovation isn't limited to R & rooms anymore. The Web 2.0 movement--powered by start-ups such as Twitter, Malhalo and even YouTube, has proven that innovation often happens in iterations. Build, launch, tweak, measure, repeat. Digital experiences seem to be 'always in beta'--learning and evolving along the way."

(Credit: Not Gartner)

The fact that the Forrester Consumer Forum dedicates a panel to this much-blogged about topic is a sign that being in beta has become a broad cultural phenomenon. By nature we are all in beta, as the Boxes and Arrows blog poignantly remarks, and clearly, we now also live in an economy where "planes are built in the air." Many new products never make it beyond trial stage, and the trial and error beta-approach that helps Google and other alpha innovators to out-fail and thereby out-innovate the competition, is as much an attribute of successful organizations as it is a sign of our time.

But it's not only analysts and conference organizers who are switching instantly from micro to macro, picking up nascent trends and elevating them to a must-deal-with core competence that transcends the current fad (just see all the Facebook conferences that are mushrooming right now). What I find even more interesting is how the media and blogosphere deal with it. If everything's in beta, the public doesn't have the patience anymore to wait for the alpha. As the media are increasingly forced to immediately widen the scope and view every innovation in a larger context as it occurs, the boundaries between reporters and commentators, bloggers and industry analysts are fading.

Some examples: Not too long ago, Twitter was all the rage, and it was stunning to see that just shortly after the initial coverage during SXSW in March, reporters were already elaborating on the concept of micro-blogging, wondering what the new "radical transparency" meant for business. Nowadays, there is a great chance that you will stumble upon a Facebook story when you open just about any publication: It's Facebook vs. MySpace, the implications of social networking on the borders between work and personal life, reflections on the "Facebook economy," Facebook vs. iTunes, and maybe a philosophical piece on Facebook "as a post-modern book" or the future of social networking, which, for TIME, equals the future of the Internet. It is only a small step from MySpace to the "MySpace generation," and from Facebook to the "Facebook generation" and then to the "Fakebook generation." Similarly, the recent buzz around Radiohead's "pay what you want" online release has instantly led to the coining of a "Radiohead Generation" and praise for the band "as a pioneer of the digital revolution." And there are hundreds of articles discussing if Radiohead's decision ushers in the definite end of the record industry. The stories about the radical distribution model appear to eclipse the actual music on the album--in this case, too, the reviews are in before the story is told.

Evidently, the media need to cope with the current while also putting forward a vision for the up and coming. The time between observation and conclusion, between description and prediction, however, has shrunk to almost zero. There are no more lapses between news, analysis, background story, industry trend story, and intellectual dissection; they have become one and the same, at the same time. Not only is beta the new alpha--beta has gone meta.

CIO magazine reports something that many of us take for granted, but which little data has previously been available to support:

The open-source development process is much, much faster at fixing bugs than the proprietary-software development process. Days faster, in fact.

CIO's Esther Schindler reports:

It's taken 27 years to reach 1 billion PCs in use, and market researchers say it will take only five to reach the next billion.

Forrester Research is set to release a report Monday titled, "Worldwide PC Adoption Forecast to 2015," saying that many of those next billion will be used by first-time PC users in emerging nations like Brazil, Russia, India and China. At least 775 million new PCs will be in use in those countries by 2015, according to Forrester.

Not only is access to computers beneficial to those users, it also will represent a big bump in sales for PC manufacturers and sellers. Though the computer industry can still profit from selling replacement machines to existing users, the big money to be made is in the far greater number of users who have never owned one.

There are, of course, drawbacks in entering new markets, the report warns. Computer sellers in mature markets can count on a fairly predictable cycle of PC buying, but untapped markets are hardly as predictable and vendors will likely need to work together to scale production appropriately over the next decade, says Forrester.

Additionally, at least part of the bump in PC ownership and use will be due to programs like One Laptop Per Child, Microsoft's Unlimited Potential, Intel's World Ahead, and AMD's 50X15, which aim to bring low-cost computing to underprivileged students and developing countries.