A game of musical chairs

You wouldn't tell off a child for playing with matches one day then give it a lighter the next. So why does the music industry think that its inconsistent attitude towards downloaded music should be any different?

The whole Napster debacle is well documented, and needn't be revived here. Ultimately, the service failed because the music industry didn't like what it was doing, or more accurately because the music industry wasn't controlling what it was doing.

Let's not forget that even after its first bout of problems Bertelsmann propped it up with an $85m (£57m) investment, in spite of having little official claim to the company itself, in the hope that one day it might be in the driving seat.

So what's the story? Was it something the music industry wanted to bury or own? Admittedly Bertelsmann had a very different business plan to that of the service's founders, but the messages were mixed nonetheless.

Towards the end of September Microsoft released Windows Media Player 9, the much heralded replacement to the player bundled in Windows ME and XP.

Its key feature, at least as far as the music industry is concerned, is Digital Rights Management (DRM), which controls how music is stored and shared.

Download the software and run the installer, and you'll be presented with a series of tick boxes through which you customise the installation. It is at this point that you realise DRM is not an optional extra as its box cannot be un-ticked.

A moment after that revelation you may start to wonder why Microsoft is so interested in protecting the incomes of the multi-billion grossing music industry. and why it spent another $7m to buy up Liquid Audio's patent rights, giving it a stranglehold on the market-leading music download and DRM technology.

Could it perhaps have something to do with the support its audio format has received from the likes of Sony, Virgin/EMI, Warner, BMG and Universal, which all use it to encode content? Microsoft certainly won the browser war. Perhaps it's now out to win the media war too, by owning the industry's favourite codec.

So what does this mean for the millions of Napster users whose days of downloading music from the internet came to an abrupt and rather undignified end? The answer to that question rather depends on what you used Napster to do.

For those who used it to build up an impressive library of tracks they had no intention of ever buying, things will, quite literally, never be the same again.

But many claimed that to them it was simply an auditioning tool. They would download a track or two from an artist they barely knew and, if they liked what they heard, they'd go out and buy the album. They are most likely in the minority, but it was a valid claim nonetheless.

For them the news is not so bleak. With that valuable industry support, Windows Media looks like continuing the Napster trend, of sorts, as Peter Gabriel's new album, Up, was released using the format on 24 September, and available to 'audition' free of charge until 1 October.

It featured 5.1-channel audio, played only in Media Player 9 and, if bought outright after the audition period, could be burnt to a CD.

For the music industry this is a win-win situation. It gets its products listened to, and has no production or distribution costs, even when it gets a sale, as the full cost of burning the disc (and producing the sleeve if you want it to fit in with the rest of your collection) is a burden entirely your own.

You can see why Bertelsmann wanted control of Napster. It may have turned it into the download equivalent of Amazon.

If the sort of digital rights measures seen in Media Player 9 had been in place years ago, Easyeverything might have been spared its courtroom tribulations, in which the British Phonographic Industry is demanding £100,000 in damages for lost revenues caused when the chain made it just a little too easy for its customers to burn downloaded media onto CD-Rom.

But the music industry is lucky. Music is invisible. It's all about sounds, not presentation, and so there is a fair chance that electronic downloads could become the industry's primary source of revenue far sooner than for the written word.

After all, while reading a book may be a physically more pleasurable experience than reading words on the screen of a PDA, it doesn't matter in which format your music is stored, as long as sound quality is acceptable.

My concern is that the way things are progressing, the channel through which we download most of our music might not be controlled by the music makers, but by a business applications writer.

The message, then, seems to be that there is a right way and a wrong way to do things, and I'm guessing that the music industry's ringing endorsement of Windows Media is largely down to the fact that teaming with the near-ubiquitous Windows OS is the quickest way for it to get a handle on the situation.

Unregulated file swapping is bad, it insists, while regulated downloads are good. It doesn't take a genius to work out that this probably has something to do with analyst predictions that digital downloads in Europe will be worth €152m (£101m) by 2005.

If Napster had survived it would have been very, very powerful indeed.

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