It’s hard to ignore the fact that a media shift is underway. Thanks to the proliferation of new devices, user-generated content, and expanding media channels, traditional and new media is beginning to converge.

This was the focus of IBM’s revealing report, “Navigating the Media Divide: Innovating and Enabling New Business Models,” which offered a list of actions that companies can take to navigate the conflict threatening traditional content owners and media distributors.

IBM’s Global Business Services unit, which produced the report, calls this looming conflict the “Media Divide.”

To examine the growing tension between traditional and new media, IBM conducted a study that included interviews with leaders of media companies and an investigative analysis of the factors that are shaping the industry outlook. The IBM report shows that new forms of media will grow at 23% compound annual rate in the next four years, nearly five times that of traditional media businesses.

The report also estimates that the music industry lost between $90-160 Billion in its transition to digital and finds that future implications are even greater for television and film if companies do not systematically navigate the media divide.

IBM sees a clear delineation between the old and new worlds of media. In the traditional world, content produced by professionals and distributed through proprietary platforms will continue to dominate. But in the new world, content is often user-created and accessed through open platforms.

The main recommendation of the report is to put consumers at the center of the business and the boardroom, and it even suggests that firms should appoint a Chief Consumer Officer: Firms must be fanatical about consumers investing in a new corporate consumer-centric mantra along with advanced segmentation analytics and personalization tools.

“The current clash between traditional and new media has reached a fevered pitch. Industry incumbents are responding but perhaps not quickly or completely enough,” said Steven Abraham, Global Industry Leader of IBM Media & Entertainment. “Now is the time to determine changes in business models, innovate and re-evaluate partnerships. Content owners and media distributors must take action before it’s too late.”