Irving Azoff, CEO of Ticketmaster, talked at length about the state of the music industry at the Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsDigital D7 conference yesterday.

As the head of the largest concert ticketing company in the US, his views are clearly skewed to live music being at the center of the music industry’s future fortunes. I think that is only partly true. One of the biggest reason the recorded music business is in such bad shape today is that the business model around it is completely disconnected from the realities of the marketplace. People pay for bottled water, so clearly “free” isn’t the only criteria people use when choosing how to access a product. Azoff is spot on when pointing out the horrible job music executives have done in transitioning the industry over to digital.

Here is an edited clip of his interview with Kara Swisher:

There are also a lot of other great interviews happening at this year’s D7 event, so a visit to the AllThingsDigital site would definitely be worth your time.

NOTE: An RSS feed of updates from D7 is available here.