`If you talk to a kid in eight years' time they will say: `What, you used to have these things [CDs]? You used to physically carry music around? How bizarre?'"
That's the thinking not of some wild-eyed visionary of the computing industry, but of the singer Seal, speaking last week. And even if some in the music industry think that his position is extreme - although analysts warn them he's absolutely right - they also recognise that the age of the download is already upon them, and are rushing to meet it at top speed.
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"Record companies are going hell for leather to digitise their current and back catalogues," one industry source said this week. Their plan: have all of their music, including their vast back catalogues, digitised and ready for downloading within two years. Millions of tracks are already in digital form for downloading - none too soon.
The music industry is in a deep depression: worldwide sales fell by almost 11 per cent in the first half of 2003, according to the industry's trade body, the IFPI. That comes on the heels of a drop in 2002 of 7 per cent in value, continuing a trend which began in 2001, when the industry saw its first fall in sales for 10 years. Sales in the US - the biggest market - are down by about a quarter compared to 2000.
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The reasons given are twofold: commercial piracy by criminal gangs who use CD factories that can be put on to the back of a lorry and driven to a new country if the police come calling; and home users burning their own CDs, either of their own music or of what they've downloaded illegally from file-sharing networks such as KaZaA or Gnutella. Others suggest different, or at least contributory, reasons: the recession in the US, which started in 2001, and the homogenisation of music through US radio, almost all owned by the media giant Clear Channel, just when the internet has made people able to find niche artists who never get airplay. Add to that the fact that record labels, in the US especially, have issued fewer albums during those years - the number of releases being strongly correlated with sales.
What nobody doubts, though, is that there are a lot of music files downloaded through file-sharing networks, for which the artists and labels don't get a penny. And so they need their own online retail outlets if they're to have any chance.
The record companies' haste to find electronic formats follows an uncompromising report from the analysis company Forrester, which in September announced that "the end of physical media is nearing".
In its report, entitled "From Discs to Downloads", Josh Bernoff, Forrester's principal analyst, noted that 20 per cent of Americans download music, and half of those admit they buy fewer CDs than they used to. The same attitude can be found in the UK, where youngsters with broadband only have to do some simple maths. Even if they do have to pay for the broadband link, that's about pounds 25 a month, which gives access to unlimited downloads. Or you could buy two chart CDs. It's not a hard choice.
"In five years, 33 per cent of music sales will come from downloads," predicts Mr Bernoff. "The implications of the shift from hard media will mean change throughout the entertainment industry - there will be clear winners and losers."
An early winner is certainly Apple Computer, which made a huge splash in the US with the launch in April of its iTunes music store, allowing users to download individual tracks for 99 cents, or the entire album for $9.99. The results were dramatic: it sold more than a million songs in its first week, two million in 16 days, five million in eight weeks, and the 10 millionth - Avril Lavigne's "Complicated" - after four months.
That sale in itself encapsulates the problems that record companies have with digital - and other - distribution: about 80 per cent of people want just 1 per cent of the tracks they offer. So having lots of songs on a download site seems promising but actually isn't quite what people want. And for the record labels, that's doubly galling, because small artists cost the labels money, and don't bring it in.
Last month, with rivals such as Napster gathering on Microsoft's Windows platform, Apple decide to join them, making the iTunes store available to Windows users too. They responded by buying a million songs in a week.
Yet there have been problems. Radiohead were at first featured on Apple's store; then, within a week, they were gone. The reason: the band wanted their songs only to be sold as entire albums, not piecemeal. Other artists, including Linkin Park, Madonna and Green Day, have also refused to let their albums be offered in pieces; an interesting point of view, since they haven't stopped putting out singles featuring album tracks. And Apple says that half of the music that was bought from the iTunes store was in the form of albums.
The US is well served for download services - and analysts think that Apple will be overhauled by rivals offering more songs, perhaps more cheaply. However, that's not the point for Apple, which uses the store to drive sales of its iPod MP3 player, on which it makes nearly as much profit as on a computer. Despite the price, it is the market leader both in sales volume and revenues.
