With the future of popular song swap service <A HREF=""Napster in doubt, the hunt is on for the next big music sharing site.
Napster may yet tough out its lawsuit from five of the world's biggest record companies, but it remains to be seen how loyal its 50m users will be once subscription charges are introduced.
Napster hopes to re-emerge as a legal service if an eventual trial finds it guilty of copyright infringement. It has plans to charge users to download music, thereby supplying the record companies with payment for copyrighted material.
But aside from Napster itself, the internet offers a great number of filesharing alternatives, some of which charge for the material downloaded, and some of which do not.
Gnutella is a large, diversified service with no central server, which makes it difficult - if not impossible - to shut down. It's not as obviously user-friendly as Napster, and America Online, fearing legal fallout, will have nothing to do with it. But it has a large community of users that share everything from music to software to recipes.
Scour.com, formerly a place to swap music files for free, was shut down and has now been bought by CenterSpan Communications. The company plans to put the Scour Exchange back online as soon as it has found a way to make it legal, which the CenterSpan defines as any method of exchange that avoids $250bn lawsuits.
CuteMX is very much in the mould of Napster, allowing users swap music and video files for free. It includes an address for record companies and artists to write in if they feel their copyright has been infringed by CuteMX users.
European newcomer Zden charges for its services as a marketplace for digital files, where people can buy, sell and store their own original content. The company describes itself as "halfway between eBay and Napster" and it controls the legality and copyright of centrally stored files. The site is far more business-focused than the other alternatives.
In any filesharing service, the critical element is the number of users it attracts, so aside from the copyright issues, any service lives or dies by its membership. It is precisely the unprecedented membership numbers that may keep Napster alive and well ahead of its competition.
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