As every conference junkie knows, you can tell a lot about the quality of an event by the questions posed when it's the audience's turn to speak. When the microphone is passed around, it doesn't take long to spot all the seminar regulars with their hands in the air.

Every discussion panel attracts them: the begrudgers, the sycophants, the people who should actually have been speaking from the get-go and, sometimes most entertaining of all, the people who have wandered into the wrong room.

All of the above symposium specimens were present and correct at Tokion magazine's Creativity Now gathering in New York the other week. The US/Japanese magazine bills itself as "the National Geographic for our pop culture generation" and the weekend was intended to be an exchange of ideas, methods and inspirations featuring practitioners from the worlds of music, film, new media, publishing, art, design, photography and marketing.

While the gathering was certainly as described, Creativity Now's real merit lay more in the context than the content. Individual speakers may have been largely identifiable with one discipline or another, but it was the blurring of lines between, say, music and film which produced the most fascinating dialogues.

It was interesting to note, too, just how integral music remains to this Venn diagram between art forms. With technology companies leaning heavily on music to hawk their products, marketing and new media professionals are acutely aware of music's selling power, something that has slipped the mind of the music industry in recent times.

Film-maker Todd Haynes has had a long and successful relationship with music subjects. With both the Barbie-doll depiction of Karen Carpenter in Superstar and the glam era excess of Velvet Goldmine, Haynes is synonymous with highly idiosyncratic music-based flicks.

Given this past record, we can expect I'm Not There, the current work-in-progress based on the career of Bob Dylan, to deviate significantly from the current glut of Dylan retrospectives. "It won't be like Scorsese," Haynes promised, as he talked about his surprise at the ease with which permission for the flick was obtained from the usually truculent troubadour. Maybe Dylan liked the idea of seven different characters (including Colin Farrell and Cate Blanchett) portraying different parts of his life.

For the documentary film-makers at Creativity Now, it was all about numbers.

Ondi Timoner, who directed DiG! about cult band The Brian Jonestown Massacre, talked about shooting over 2,000 hours of footage during the seven years she spent with the band.

Bruce Sinofsky's Metallica: Some Kind of Monster cost over $4 million to bring to fruition ("that included $40,000 per month for the therapist," he quipped). Jonathan Caouette reckons the shooting budget for his Tarnation documentary on his own dysfunctional family came to around $200. While considerably more would later be spent on music rights and clearances, therapy bills were probably reduced as a result of the film.

By contrast, the panel on independent music treated the issue of finance with something close to old-fashioned disdain. Featuring reps from the Merge (Arcade Fire, Lambchop), K (Beat Happening) and Domino (Franz Ferdinand, Four Tet) labels, it concentrated more on the heritage of the independent movement and outmoded definitions of indie rock than attempting to move the discussion forward.

It didn't help that the panel moderator was somewhat clueless about the topic under discussion, but it was odd in the extreme that there was little or no mention of what the rise of the internet as a distribution hub has meant for the indie aesthetic. Instead, with its talk of large retail chains and the indie-schmindie scoring of points over the corporatisation of various distribution companies, it could have passed for a round-table discussion from 1991.

But it probably explained just why moaning and groaning are the pre-sets for the bulk of the music industry (indies included) when it comes to new innovations and developments. Rather than engage with the changes and accept that the old models are gone forever, the music industry still has a hankering to go back to the future. Time for them to listen to Bob Dylan perhaps, because that's all over now, baby blue.