Record companies should immediately begin emphasising their physical product and downplay the value of digital product.

Start advertising campaigns that compare buying MP3s with cassette compilations taped off the radio.

Make fun of the quality and the fragility of the format. Perhaps show someone's hard disk crashing, or pick on someone who just collects as much music as they can digitally but never listens to it.

Immediately drop the price of your compressed digital back catalog product. By a lot. Emphasise that people buying an MP3 aren't really buying anything. Include lots of advertisements and encouragement on your online stores to purchase the real thing. The CD. Perhaps provide discounts for those who have purchased already online but want to buy the real thing.

Release singles online at the current price ($1). Fans will pay extra to hear the song immediately. If it does well, print it up. Or wait to gather enough songs for a compilation.

Or start up the concept of purchasing music online digitally to download and listen immediately, with the real CD sent in the mail. Push it so hard that buying just the music seems like trying before really buying.

Reconnect the music with the physical product.

Alter your manufacturing so that the CDs you press are of the highest quality (but not too high, they must still be cheap) and emphasise the fact they'll last a really really long time. Again play up the fragility of digital data. The nothingness of it.

And while you're in there, set yourself up for small runs. So if fans call for a limited run of a deleted CD, set yourself up so it's possible. Set yourself as a competitor to eBay's music rarities. Fans will pay $100 for a copy of a CD that's out of print. Maybe they'll pay $25 for a good quality reprint. Do it so often the rarities market dies.

Release your back catalog digitally, especially all of your deleted artists, and then advertise them. Pay attention to what does well and print a limited run of CDs. Or better yet, set up proper official fan sites for your artists and ask then fans directly what they want to physically buy.

Show lots of images in your adverts of CDs on shelves, looking awesome, juxtaposed with images of beige computers and portable hard drives. Posters. T-Shirts. Images of THINGS.

Don't stop people ripping their CDs. Don't even try. Perhaps even include the MP3s on it in a standard way to save people the effort. The MP3 is after all just a way to listen to their CD. It isn't the CD. Encourage the MP3 as a way to listen to their music safely without losing their CD. Emphasise how awesome the CD is to own.

Again... perhaps it is too late for this. Perhaps their biggest market (teenagers) have already given up on CDs. Given up on the concept of buying or owning a CD collection.

Further, bandwidth is so high now CDs are often pirated in uncompressed formats. Perfect copies... with scans of the cover art. Arguments for the fragility and valuelessness of such digital data might still work, but less so than for MP3s. Less so than for a world where everyone has a computer (inc. portable music playing computers), and uses it almost exclusively for their music listening.

Try to bring that concept of a CD collection back. Try really really hard.

Try to make it awesome and desirable again.

Too late...?

Record companies could have dropped CD as a format completely. Instead of Super DVD or DVDA or whatever the heck they tried. They could have just gone for DVD.

Start pushing DVD as the new CD.

Most "boom box" type stereos bought these days come with a DVD player, rather than a CD player. Start pushing for that to be the norm. Start pushing for all in car CD players to also play DVDs. No need for video or any of that jazz. Just play the audio. Ignore the video track.

As a bonus, DVD players play CDs. Backwards compatibility.

Set up the menu of your DVD to automatically play the music on the DVD. That's your CD. Stick it in your in-car player and it plays. Just like a CD.

Stick it in your DVD player at home and it also plays. Push the menu button and you get your extras.

Nothing clever or expensive like the doubled sided things. Just a disc in a box, like always.

You can create a DVD with uncompressed audio. PCM 48hz. Better quality than a CD (44.1hz).

All video is like an extra.

I'd prefer a normal CD sized box, but if we must go to DVD sized boxes from now on... I can deal with that.

Summary:

• Print CDs as DVDs with uncompressed audio
• Set DVD to play music when put in, no menu
• "Extras" via the DVD menu button
• Most people already have DVD player set up on their stereo
• Requires in-car/discmans to play DVDs, this is cheap and easy

But it's a couple of years too late for this, as the Discman is pretty much dead, replaced with the iPod, and most in-car stereo set ups are aimed at MP3 these days.

I could still see a time when DVD becomes the music format, while movies start being released on Blue-Ray. Or perhaps re-releases of albums as DVDs with making of extras.

Update: Although they don't have to, the Big Day Out are offering refunds to Sydney ticket holders if they don't want to go now that Bjork has pulled out. There will be signs at the door explaining the situations but refunds will not be possible once you've gone in.

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Bjork has pulled out of the Sydney Big Day Out due to swollen vocal chords.

Organisers hope she will rejoin for the Melbourne show on Monday.

I would never have bought a Big Day Out ticket if it weren't for Bjork, so if she doesn't play I'll be seriously disappointed.

But I don't want to see her perform badly due to sickness either.

All the other bands at the Big Day Out are a bonus. We've put together a string of bands that will set us up for the whole day, but most are ones we haven't seen before. Just checkin' 'em out.

If I wasn't going to the Big Day Out I'd probably be going to Dream Theater or the Enter Shikari's side-show.

Or nothing.

Get well soon Bjorky!