In two different news stories summarizing the latest Nielsen Soundscan music sales report, the music industry is cast as growing at a remarkable clip or continuing its long, slow decline.

Variety takes the latter tack, moaning, “Album sales take a tumble in 2007.” In contrast, the Centre Daily Times celebrates the growth in total sales from 1.2 billion units in 2006 to 1.4 billion last year.

Of course, as this story filters into the rest of the media, Variety’s spin will undoubtedly carry more weight. Yet the shift to digital units is hardly all doom and gloom.

Digital delivery is cheaper–especially for the labels, considering that Apple, Walmart, and Amazon pay to host and move the files. End users do a great deal of the marketing for the labels. Ringtones are also a robust market. In short, this data suggests the year-to-year change in 2007 is roughly a wash.

It is painful for the music industry to change its business practices away from the physical distribution of albums to the digital distribution of tracks. For most industries, the collective response is, “Tough luck.” Nobody mourned the passing of the buggy whip industry. Yet the music industry gets political and rhetorical support befitting an endangered species.

In the long term, the music industry should be expected to adapt to consumer expectations–a strategy they finally seem to be taking to heart.

(Thanks to Joe Turow for the Variety link.)

US News interviewed a handful of cutting-edge tech gurus, asking them, “What if you were appointed innovation czar?”

Three themes run through the answers:

1) Portable, especially universal health care. People stay in uninspiring jobs because they need the health insurance. Provide this automatically, and risk takers are free to start new businesses, take chances on startups, and otherwise leave the safety net of the established economic players.

2) Provide thinner protection for legal information monopolies. Glenn Reynolds recommends simpler, thinner patent protection. Cory Doctorow urges the repeal of Title I of the DMCA, which prevents the circumvention of copyright management technologies.

3) Dump cash into targeted education programs.

Any of the three would accelerate innovation, and the combination would be explosive.

Copyright expert William Patry has a great post summarizing two RIAA-bashing opinion pieces in the New York Times and Washington Post.

Both articles challenge the RIAA’s expansive view of copyright, but Patry is insightful enough to identify it as a bogus claim of natural property rights. It is not merely enough to point out the radically expansive view of copyright being advanced. We must identify the underlying moral values (creative expression is metaphorically understood in terms of real property) and challenge them by developing and espousing our own moral values (individual expression as an immutable moral right) and metaphors (nonprofessional expression as an endangered species, hunted down by copyright lawyers).

Props to Patry for again nudging us in the right direction.

University of Utah researchers have concluded that people who talk on cell phones while driving gum up traffic.

Read the story at CNet.