The first sentence is missing a verb for the prepositional phrase "of the accelerating decline." In other words, the sentence would need to sound like this..."afraid of the accelerating decline.....not being compensated by...." whereas in the second sentence there is no prepositional phrase and "afraid that the accelerating decline...would not be compensated by..." forms a complete subject verb match.

The sentence has two clauses:
Principal clause:The music company was afraid
Subordinate clause:the accelerating decline of sales of compact disks would not be compensated by increased Internet revenue.
As above two are in their own sense two standalone structures having cause-effect relationship.They need to be suitably joined using 'connector'.
Use of 'of' is incorrect here as it tends to make it a simple sentence.
Use of 'that' is correct as it correctly makes the two part a cause-effect 'compound sentence'.

abhi332 wrote:incorrect:
The music company was afraid of the accelerating decline of sales of compact disks would not be compensated by increased Internet revenue.

correct:
The music company was afraid that the accelerating decline of sales of compact disks would not be compensated by increased Internet revenue.

why 2nd one is correct?

Hi,

I have a slightly different question for the same sentence. For the sentence - " The music company was afraid that the accelerating decline of sales of compact disks would not be compensated by increased Internet revenue." - isn't there an issue with parallelism?
Shouldn't the correct sentence be - " The music company was afraid that the accelerating decline of sales of compact disks would not be compensated by INCREASING Internet revenue." or " The music company was afraid that the ACCELERATED decline of sales of compact disks would not be compensated by increased Internet revenue." ?

Basically, shouldn't 'accelerating' and 'increasing' be parallel?

Thanks