It has taken a while, but the slumbering giants of the world's major record labels are finally waking up to the digital music distribution revolution.
On Tuesday, media giant Bertelsmann announced it was teaming up with Napster, the controversial music swapping company, to develop a secure music service.
The move, which caught the industry by surprise, comes despite the fact one part of the Bertelsmann empire is suing Napster for copyright infringement. Bertelsmann will now withdraw that lawsuit once Napster introduces the new members-only service.
Meanwhile Universal, the biggest of the five labels that dominate the world's music industry, has announced an online trial, offering "all you can eat" music for a monthly subscription. Listeners in the US will be able to stream unlimited amounts of Universal's back catalogue for a flat monthly fee, although they will not be able to store the music themselves.
But, while Napster fans download pirated tracks faster than you can say "what copyright?" the question now facing the industry is simple: is there any point to these experiments?
The paralysis of the major labels in the face of developments in internet distribution of music has done little to help the industry advance. Caught between the horror of giving their valuable back catalogues away free over the net, and the possibility that the net could depress sales, labels have preferred - until now - to go to court.
There, they have pursued those upstarts benefiting from the gap in the marketplace, such as Napster and myMP3.com, which they say have helped users download illegally copied music.
But with labels losing out as their material is pirated, and the startups facing ruin if the courts find against them, only the lawyers looked likely to win until this week.
But Bertelsmann's tie- up with Napster could signal a shift in the majors' attitudes - not least because the record company says it wants to help establish Napster as a service accepted by all the big labels.
That Universal is trialling subscription-model based access to its online vaults is also regarded as a step, albeit a smaller one, in the right direction. Sources at the company say it is something they had been considering for some time, having witnessed the huge success of Napster over the past year.
Sam Shemtob of the British Association of Independent Music says that the key to a success for a legitimate rival to Napster will be getting a good choice of artists for consumers.
"Napster has shown there is great potential for the right type of service, and Universal's plans are a significant step forward," he says. "But factors like pricing and com prehensiveness of repertoire are likely to play an important part in determining how popular different services will be."
AIM spotted the potential of the internet ahead of all the majors, and is now carrying out online trials with 95% of Britain's independent labels. These are designed to assess the value of streamed digital music by discussion between the labels and the websites offering them to users.
"The key is to provide a one stop shop for accessing repertoire from across AIM's 450 member labels, enabling new services to offer music from all these labels simultaneously," says Shemtob.
Despite the Bertelsmann tie-up with Napster, downloads - for the time being - will not appear from the big labels, who want to retain control of the music files themselves. They still see today's MP3 files as a big threat to their core business - selling CDs. That is why Bertelsmann will not drop its lawsuit until Napster has shown it can create a secure, revenue-creating version of its service.
Should Napster succeed and gain support from other labels, it will have a big advantage over the likes of Universal's go-it-alone streaming service. A secure Napster, aside from offering the convenience of downloadable sound files, which can be stored on disks or MP3 players, would stand a chance of sporting something like the same broad repertoire it has today.
To Napster fans today, any Napuser's hard drive is their resource. Thousands of those hard drives exist around the globe, offering tracks culled from all labels, from all eras. With Universal's tentative effort, users can access only Universal's virtual vaults. They are being asked to pay more for less.
A third problem exists for UK music lovers. Because of the slow arrival of "always on" broadband net connections, streaming media still costs UK users an arm and a leg. Streaming music will not take off here while most of Britain's internet users are still paying by the minute for slow 56k connections, which also limit the quality of any streaming audio they receive to AM radio quality.
Other net giants with their eyes on the musical prize include America Online (AOL). Since it announced its multi-billion dollar merger with Time Warner, it has been looking to exploit its unique position to marry content with customers. Last week it, too, announced plans to stream music to customers, bringing Warner material to AOL's 24 million subscribers.
The cult of MP3 is not unassailable. Many MP3 fans feel that the files are free because they're not worth paying for: the data compression which makes the files manageable also diminishes sound quality.
What they feel would be worth paying for would be a comprehensive, high quality, broadband streaming service. Millions of tracks are languishing in record company vaults. Digitise them once, make them as easily accessed as Napster allows MP3s to be found today, and people could stream vast swathes of usually lost music to their speakers. You could have the world's best stocked music library for a simple monthly license fee - a music lover's dream.
Peter Quick, label manager for the net-progressive independent Ninja Tune Records, explains: "People use Napster because it provides a service the record companies do not. If you had a broadband subscription service that helped you listen to everything you wanted in the format you wanted, that's something people would pay for. That's why it will work."
