AUSTIN, TX--As he pulled out loads of the latest high-tech, music-playing gadgets from his bag at South by Southwest (SXSW) this afternoon, Ted Cohen said the digital music game at this point is all about dividing up the money.

At a midday panel at the ever-growing music industry festival, Cohen told the audience that the technology is there to deliver music to fans on an array of platforms, but that the major labels and the bevy of companies hoping to sell their music digitally are still working out the financial fine print.

"It's not about the technology anymore," said Cohen the head of music giant EMI's digital distribution and development. "The technology is there, but now it's about the business models. When you're dividing up the pie, how long do you keep the pie from delivered to the consumer before you say, 'hey, this is silly'?" Cohen, a 36-year music industry veteran in charge of ushering his label into the digital age, urged people to be patient, however.

"Everyone wants the switch to be thrown one day," he said. "It's a transition, and we're in the midst of it."

Digital music sales accounted for 6 percent of total sales in 2005, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. That number will continue to grow, Cohen said.

"There's a lot more music out there now and a lot more being made available," he said. "A lot more artists can find their niche now than before." Cohen cited as an example KT Tunstall, a British artist whose single, "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree," propelled her Eye to the Telescope album to more than 1 million sales in the UK and three Brit Award nominations.

"We're doing a great job of getting someone who is incredibly talented noticed quickly," Cohen said. "It's all about resources and spending money intelligently.

Ten years ago, we threw money at things without targeting that spending." The interoperability between the various digital music services, specifically between Apple's iTunes/iPod juggernaut and those using Microsoft's PlaysForSure digital rights management technology (DRM), continues to be a barrier.

Cohen noted that PlayForSure, Microsoft's DRM, has had its fair share of problems over the past few years.

"The joke was that we wished it played for sure, we hope it plays for sure and someday it will play for sure," he said. "But we're getting there. All of it is predicated on it being a really good portable experience, and it will be a really fluid experience and it will challenge the iPod."