Two years ago, the music industry was infuriated by Apple’s call for music lovers to ”Rip, mix and burn” their favourite music — rip the music from CDs on to their computers, mix tracks together and burn the result on to a CD. The big labels saw the advertising campaign as an incitement to mass music piracy. Now Apple has gone one step further. It has unveiled a new music download service that offers 200 000 songs for 99c apiece, whole albums for $9,99 with only the loosest restrictions on how the music is subsequently used. The difference this time is that the move was feted by record labels, industry associations and stars including U2 front man Bono, jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and singer Alanis Morissette. ”You can’t stop piracy,” said the musician Seal at the launch in San Francisco. ”So you have to work with technology, and you have to get into the rhythm of it. That’s what Apple has done here.”Even Hilary Rosen, who, as chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), has been seen as the hammer of online music, was full of praise for Apple’s new iTunes Music Store, calling it ”cool” and ”cutting edge”. And while the store is available only for US-based Mac users today, Windows users in the States will be let in on the act soon. Apple also hopes to negotiate worldwide rights for its music library, allowing overseas customers to make purchases too, although it is unable to say how long that process will take.The arrival of the new service, backed by all five major record labels, capped a remarkable seven days for the music business. The industry has seen its fierce legal pursuit of file-sharing services suffer a serious setback, and signalled a U-turn in its attitude towards music downloads.As well as the new Apple service, which initially is only available to users in the United States, record giant EMI has announced it is going to make 90 percent of its catalogue available for download to British users, through Freeserve and BT’s DotMusic, among others. Both services represent a move away from the record industry’s first steps online. These typically charge subscriptions and charge users extra to burn music to disk, with some songs ”expiring” after a certain date.These restrictions have not been popular with music lovers. Analysts estimate that existing music download services have only managed to attract around 650 000 users worldwide. By comparison, figures released by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) suggest that there are about five million music downloaders in the United Kingdom alone.Replacing the illegal downloads with a legitimate alternative will be a huge challenge for the music industry, says Peter Jamieson, the BPI’s executive chairperson. ”It is definitely the most significant quantum change that the music industry is going to have to face in any of our lifetimes,” he says. ”Moving on to an online situation is different from, say, moving from wax to LP to CD or whatever.”But it is a change the labels have decided to make, just as their previously sweeping legal offensive against online file-sharing serviceshas faltered. The industry, led by the RIAA, has pursued a number of start-ups through the courts.The RIAA’s action closed Napster, the forerunner of today’s peer-to-peer services. But the music labels recently suffered a major setback when a US district court judge said the companies that make peer-to-peer file sharing software are not doing anything illegal —- even if their users are.The decision, if upheld on appeal, will mean the industry will have to start pursuing individual music pirates, rather than the companies who make the file-sharing software. That is unlikely to be practical for more than a few showcase trials.”The record labels are moving from a very defensive stance,” says Calum Chace, a partner at KPMG who specialises in media. ”Their main concern has been to protect their copyright material, which is not an unreasonable thing to want to do. They’ve now moved from that to realising that in the future, people simply are going to get their music this way: that they are going to download it. It’s much better they be the providers than it all gets pirated.”While the record labels have complained in the past that ”you can’t compete with free”, Chace suggests they do have advantages over illegal downloads. ”If you try downloading stuff from KaZaA and Morpheus, it’s quite slow and cumbersome … you also know at the back of your mind that it’s not legal. That might, depending on the kind of person you are, bother you from a self-protection or even moral point of view. ”If the music industry makes its sites quick, easy, not horribly expensive, it’s hard to compete with free, but not impossible,” says Chace. ”And they’ve got so many other weapons in their arsenal — they can offer discounted tickets to concerts, or access to seated areas, discounts on merchandise, or chatrooms where the stars turn up. There’s a lot the industry can do. Digital content marketing is the future, I’m convinced.” —