Herbie Hancock, the veteran jazz musician, has been around the music scene long enough to know exactly how it ticks. "Record companies have been ripping off artists, writers and the public for more than a century, to the point where I can honestly say I just don't trust them all," he writes in the introduction to Sonic Boom, a new book about the music industry's struggle to come to terms with digital technology.
But neither does Hancock have any time for the alternative model currently available for the music industry: Napster-style peer-to-peer file sharing over the internet. "Napster has yet to give anything to artists other than the chance to spread their music, free, and whether they like it or not."
Sonic Boom records the industry's panic at facing the millions of users attracted to Napster, and the hostility with which it fought the growth of music file-sharing, encapsulated in Seagram's threat to "move a Roman legion or two of Wall Street lawyers to litigate" against Silicon Valley.
Yet in recent months there are signs that the mainstream industry has learned some valuable lessons about using the new digital technology from upstart organisations such as Napster, and is preparing to put them to work for its own ends.
AOL/Time Warner last week allowed its Reprise Records label to put the new album by New Order on its Spinner.com website for a short period, ending today. What makes the move so unusual is that the whole of Get Ready, the bandÕs first studio album for eight years, will be streamed on the site in advance of its retail release on October 16. In the past, Warner Music which was one of the strongest objectors to internet file-sharing had allowed only brief snatches of new music to be legally heard over the net.
The move is partly a defensive one by Reprise high-profile album releases have a tendency to leak out through the actions of zealous fans. And a time-limited preview is also great advertising for the main product: "The best way to sell music is the music itself," says Ron Shapiro, general manager of Atlantic Records, another AOL/Time Warner label. The Spinner.com site neatly ties into online CD pre-release orders for the album, in a seamless transition from listening to buying.
Record labels offering new tracks have become another weapon in the battle for exposure, as the most popular websites such as Yahoo! and MSN are keen to compete with dedicated music sites in offering pre-release tracks.
The next logical step is also being embraced by the major record companies allowing music to be downloaded using a program that plays a track or an album for a finite period before erasing itself.
In fact, this is exactly the sort of activity the internet was supposed to offer: disintermediation, the over-long buzzword for cutting out the middle man. But it is the established companies who are making the moves, rather than the smaller start-ups that were expected to be the innovators. As it was caught out in the 1980s by a new twist in technology Ð the launch of MTV and the video boom the music industry was determined not to be left flatfooted again.
Having seen off the initial threat from file-sharing fans by using legions of lawyers and the courts, the big music companies are now racing to find a method of using the net for their own advantage before Napster's alliance with Bertelsmann Music Group takes shape.
The "big five" of the music industry - Universal, Sony, Warner Music, EMI and Bertelsmann - won a court injunction against Napster in March this year, and Napster voluntarily suspended its file-sharing service on July 2 after it failed to sort out technological problems with its filter for blocking copyrighted work. Now Napster and Bertelsmann are working together to develop a secure subscription service, which aims to harness the flexibility and scope of peer-to-peer file-sharing that gave Napster 500,000 users a day.
The new service will be launched at the end of the year. The outline announced by the company last week suggests a free file-sharing area will still be available for non-copyrighted material, alongside the subscription service. Napster's chief executive Konrad Hilbers says the company has still not decided how much it will charge. "It is quite obvious that we are challenging some of the music industry's business models, particularly on the CD pricing," he says.
And it is not just music's big boys who are preparing to make more effective use of the net. The movie industry, which has probably been even more suspicious of the web as a medium, announced two weeks ago the start of a grand alliance to deliver films over the net. The irony is that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has spent much of the past two years using a sledgehammer of lawyers to crack a nut in the form of 2600 - a tiny magazine which publicised a software program allowing DVDs to be played on some computers - in a case that promises to wend its way towards the US supreme court.
The MPAA's case centred around the dangers of allowing movies to be shared on the internet. Yet two weeks ago four major studios - MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros - said they thought the spread of home broadband connections has made it possible to offer video-on-demand services over the net.
PC owners will be able to choose films on offer after watching online previews and then order a movie for a suggested $4 (£2.75). Downloading the movie file is likely to take at least 40 minutes. The movie is stored on the PC's hard drive for up to 30 days, but once it is opened for viewing it will erase itself within 24 hours. How long all this will take is anyone's guess, but, as Herbie Hancock suggests, if the entertainment industry can make money then it will find a way.
• Sonic Boom: Napster, P2P and the Battle for the Future of Music by John Alderman is published by Fourth Estate, £17.99.
