It would be easy to conclude that music industry executives patrolling the Croisette in Cannes all wear a haunted look. Revenues from recorded music are crumbling before their eyes. The growth of digital music is far too slow to make up for it. And the immediate future looks horribly like the recent past, only worse.

The reality is, of course, that their one-thousand-mile stares probably derive from sleeplessness; the inevitable toll of tumbling from hotel to hotel along Cannes’ palm-lined, moonlit seafront in search of the next decent cocktail.