Breaking news from the Digital Music Forum East 2008 Conference. In Ars Technica’s coverage of the conference, they posted the highlights of Ted Cohen’s opening speech which contained the groundbreaking news: Music 1.0 is dead. To be fair, the former Senior Vice President of Digital Development and Distribution for EMI seems to have a pretty good idea about what’s going on.

What surprises me, is that it needs to be said at all. Is there anyone anywhere who doesn’t understand what kind of trouble the old music industry model is experiencing. There’s more print and and bandwith devoted to the topic of its slow death every day than Gutenberg could have imagined in his wildest dreams  and yes, I can see the irony in writing that in a piece on the same topic.

Here’s just one example of the what I’m getting at. Last year 48% of U.S. teenagers did not buy a single cd – a ten per cent increase over 2006.  One estimate puts the ratio of illegal to legal downloading at 20 to 1. Clearly, it’s time to re-think things.

Cohen suggests a solution. He says that instead of wallowing in their desperation, the industry needs to be to be “wildly creative” and look a new models of doing business. I have a wildly creative suggestion. Instead of trying to swim up stream, all the time, the music industry could try getting with the program. Do I have a concrete solution? No. But there are success stories that the industry can look to for starters.

The success of Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want album is just one example of the music industry trying to drag itself into the 21st century. The digital market is only going to grow as legal downloads occupy an increasingly important and sizable component of revenue. It’s time the music industry took these fringe ideas and ran with them instead of trying to prop up a failing business model.

The music industry has got energy to spare. One needs only to look as far as the RIAA’s “energetic” pursuit of filesharers to see that. Maybe it’s time that the industry took a little bit of that energy and put it to use doing a better job of how to figure out how to do a better job.