The age of the digital download has been widely touted as the death knoll for physical music formats and the music retail industry. If this does turn out to be the case, it will only be down to an inexcusable and, frankly, inexplicable lack of vision on the part of the retailers.

There are many reasons why people still want to buy music in formats such as CD, vinyl and tape. Here are seven of them:

1) most digital downloads are in basic mp3 format - a heavily compressed file suited to rapid download and occupying minimal disc storage space. The result, of course, is that the quality is poor;

2) most people will then listen to these poor quality mp3 files on PCs or personal mp3 players with speakers or headphones with severely limited dynamics and sonic range. The result is that the quality gets worse still;

5) there are still many people who like the physical "package" that you get when you buy a CD or a record, complete with cover art, information booklet and the audio format. OK, all these things can be downloaded, but by the time you've downloaded the complete package and found some way to assemble it all for storage and reference purposes, surely you'd have been better off buying the genuine retail package?

There is one other significant point I would raise here - that the burning ambition of new, upcoming artists/bands largely remains the holy grail of securing a deal with a record label and releasing a physical album. All musicians know that anyone with a basic microphone, PC, soundcard and home recording software can record a song and make it available on the internet as a digital download, such that there is little or no kudos in being able to say "We've got our songs available on the web". The recording deal still means that a label has actively selected that artist/band from the huge mass of contenders and said "You're good enough for us to invest in and record and promote your album", and kids in their bedrooms still dream of signing the deal, releasing the debut album on CD and getting the 5-star review in the NME / Rolling Stone / etc.

The answer is VERY simple. While the internet has given us access to an enormous range of different music, the major retailers have completely failed to identify the changing requirements of the music buyer and are trying to retail in the same tired old way they always have done.

Generally (and perhaps even more surprisingly) the leading, mainstream online retailers are just as guilty as their bricks'n'mortar counterparts in the laziness of their methods. But for the time being, let me concentrate on the good, old-fashioned high street store.

When you walk into a big music retail store (I live in London, but I presume this is an international phenomenon) you are first greeted by a rack of CDs of the current chart Top 20; next comes a rack of new releases by major, established, big-selling artists; then comes the row after row of 'A-Z of Rock and Pop' - all the old back catalogues of the major labels; and then off in the dark corners are the little niche sections for Jazz, Blues, Soul, Folk, World, House, Urban, Classical, etc - each of which has a tepid selection of the most middle-of-the-road fare available in its category. So, what's happening here?

Firstly, the prime positions in the store are entirely consumed with mainstream pop which is either being illegally downloaded on the web by kids who will always take their music for free so they can keep their little money for clothes and going out, or is being sold cheaper down the road in supermakets such as Tesco (UK) / WalMart (US) etc. Not only does this severely limit sales potential of these titles, it also gives the retailer a reputation for being an expensive source of music which is legally cheaper or illegally free elsewhere.

Secondly, the great bulk of the store is taken up with titles from established commercial artists/bands of the past few decades. Now OK, I know sales of Bob Dylan and Beatles albums will always continue to tick over - but how many do those stores sell each week? Many of those albums just sit in their racks month after month, year after year.

Thirdly, there's simply no excitement in entering these stores because there is so little hope of the customer making any new discovery. What other retail sector would have the same stock sitting in the same position on the same shelves all the time? If clothing retailers or furniture retailers did this, they'd be out of business in months. Even provisions stores move the location and change the displays of their baked beans from time to time to re-enliven customer interest!

If high street music retailers want their customers back, they need to strip out their stores and completely re-design them. Their stores must become places where customers can make new discoveries on each visit, where they will be "tempted" to buy and try new music. So, how is this done?

(i) take a large sector of the store and split it up into sections devoted to popular music magazines / radio shows / websites which review new releases. So, for example, in the UK a store could have an NME section, a 'Q' section, a Mojo section, a Wire section, a Folk Roots section, a Songlines section, a Gramaphone section, and so on. Each section would display a selection of reviews from the latest issue of that magazine in a poster format on the wall/display stand and the stock of the corresponding CDs in the racks beneath. Displays change each time a new issue comes out. Unsold stock initially goes into storage on the premises for a few weeks in case customers come in asking for something they saw recently but didn't buy at the time, and then either gets returned to the distributor, or goes on to an internet order fulfilment company (either the retailer's own web sales, or a co-operating web retailer). Similarly, there can be sections featuring CDs of the artists creating the biggest buzz on websites such as myspace and lastfm in the past week/month;

(ii) each retail store creates its own in-house chart - its own top-selling 10 or 20 titles in the previous month are displayed together with customer reviews so that the customers of that particular store are actively engaged in making recommendations to other customers. Let's face it, everyone loves to recommend music they love to others - so use the fact and give people an outlet for their views;

(iv) add a staff recommendation section. A lot of stores use this already - but it tends to be a bit clandestine and apologetic. Staff recommendations are a great way of building staff/customer relations so make it an up-front, permanent feature. Regular customers will get to know the taste of particular staff members and come to rely on their recommendations;

(v) introduce a local artists section. The hinterland of every music store is a hive of musical activity. Retailers can work in conjunction with local recording studios to encourage local artists/bands to make recordings and have a small run of CDs pressed. Local papers can be asked to review them, and then the reviews can be displayed together with the albums in-store. The artists/bands will then be telling all their family and friends to go down to the store and buy their album, but at the same time, it gives all the store's customers the opportunity to discover these new releases. Retailers with a national base could then have all their branches submit local artist releases to a national monthly competition, and the winners get national distribution through all branches;

(vi) in-store listening stations should use digital technology to give customers the largest possible choice. Every track on every CD in the store should be available on a digital database linked to every listening station so a customer can select any CD from the racks, take it to a listening post, type in the album code number (or scan the barcode) and track number and hear that track (or a sample segment of it). This is what they can do online, so make it possible for them to do it in-store too;

(vii) have a section of the store linked to major current events. A prime example of this is the summer festival season. Here in the UK we have several big annual festivals including Reading and Glastonbury attended by hundreds of thousands of people. In the few weeks immediately after such festivals, retail stores could display albums by all the artists who appeared so festival goers would know where to find the CDs of any new bands they've just discovered while the festival experience is still fresh in their minds.

I'll stop there, but once you start thinking about this, the possibilities just go on and on, and you become increasingly amazed that these major retailers, with their development departments and market research data, simply sit back moaning about illegal digital downloads and waiting to become as dead as the proverbial dodo.

In January 2006 I wrote a six page letter to HMV, the UK's biggest retail chain, setting out my blueprint for revamping their stores (along similar lines to the above). A few weeks later I must confess I was surprised to receive a personal reply from the Managing Director of HMV UK & Ireland - a Mr Steve Knott. I quote directly the following extract from his letter:

"Thank you also for your very detailed, informative and thought-provoking comments. HMV is indeed seriously reviewing many of the aspects of our in-store merchandising which you discuss, We have conducted comprehensive customer research which, you will be pleased to know, raises many of the issues and opportunities you articulate so well in your correpondence.

That was over two years ago and I am still waiting to see these changes. Meanwhile, I have experienced two developments specifically in relation to HMV which, as far as I am concerned, make the mind boggle:

a) it has been rumoured in the media in recent months that HMV is planning to dramatically reduce the amount of store space it currently allocates to music CDs and give the space over to sales of PC/playstation games. If this is true, this is their maddest idea yet. HMV has long-term traditional strength as a music retailer - this is where its core business lies. It will not be able to successfully expand into the games market where it will be competing with better established web retailers, supermarkets and specialist retail stores such as Game. HMV will probably not be able to match, let alone better the prices of those other retailers, so what does it possibly imagine is going to attract new gaming customers into its stores?

b) last year I contributed a track from my current album to a major British folk compilation called "John Barleycorn Reborn". Following months of negotiation, we (project curator Mark Coyle, label Cold Spring and I) managed to get HMV to run a review of the album in their in-store specialist genre magazine "Choice" - apparently the fourth largest circulation music publication in the UK. The review was published in the folk section of the March/April 2008 issue, gave the album a powerful recommendation and also included reference to the album's 4-star review in Songlines Magazine. During the weeks following publication of this issue of HMV Choice, I visited three HMV stores on several occasions, including the two huge flagship stores in Oxford Street in the centre of London, and not one of these stores had a single copy of the album in stock!

It is quite clear to me that the malaise of the music retail sector is rooted in bad management, lack of direction and lack of imagination. I do NOT accept that sales of physical albums in formats such as CD, vinyl and tape are dead, but I do fear that the appalling state of the retail sector will kill them if it doesn't get a complete overhaul in the very near future.

I am privileged and excited to have one of my songs included in a major new release exploring the folk music of Dark Britannica.

"John Barleycorn Reborn" is a 2CD set plus free downloadable third part featuring British artists inspired by our ancient folklore and traditions, but whose work has, until now, fallen below the radar of mainstream media. It is anticipated that this release on the Cold Spring label will receive widespread high profile reviews and radio airplay, and this will be backed up with excellent distribution to make the album as widely available as possible.

"John Barleycorn" is one of the oldest known British folk songs and a beautiful booklet in the CD package explains its history and how it sets the tone for this collection of songs, lovingly curated by Mark Coyle of specialist digital retailer Woven Wheat Whispers.

My song "The Scryer and the Shewstone" is one of four sample tracks now playing on the John Barleycorn Reborn myspace music player - click the image in the Top Friends here on my page to go there.

Thanks for your interest, and please help to spread the news of this release.