The origin of online music is found in the doctoral thesis of Karlheinz Brandenburg, a physicist who started his research in 1985 and in 1995 christened his new system of audio compression as MP3. Two years later the Internet saw its first pages dedicated to finding and promoting musical groups. In Spain, WebListen started offering digital music in January 1998.

It is clear that Internet's development would never have been the same without Napster, invented by a student named Shawn Fanning in the summer of 1999. For many users the Web became a paradise thanks to that portal allowing exchange of music absolutely for free. The same can be said of broad-band technology because thousands of Web-surfers installed ADSL systems because of the incentive of being able to download songs faster than with conventional connections. Multinational companies in the music industry witnessed these developments and wasted little time in declaring war on a system that threatened to slash profits.�

The idea that Napster and its heirs committed no crime by providing the tools for file sharing among individuals ran headlong into judicial rulings, which so far have taken sides with the record companies and their representatives. After an intense battle that led to the closure of Napster, record companies and copyright management companies got together to control this particular conduit of the Internet. The record companies' goal is to head off any system for sharing files, resorting to warnings aimed at people who use these tools.�

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Use of such aggressive measures against alleged violators angered the digital community. The Recording Industry Association of America, led by EMI, BMG, Sony, Universal and Warner, eased the offensive by assuring that it would only take legal action against those who downloaded large numbers of music files free over the Internet.

To set these straight amid so much confusion, the European Union is preparing a copyright directive under which downloading music will be subject of the same rates as other activities involving cable transmission.�

A recent study by Spain's Asociaci�n de la M�sica en Internet (AMI) concluded that Spaniards are not willing to pay for downloading music. The study said 98% of musical downloading is done with peer to peer (P2P) programs, in other words, from user to user and for free. So no copyright fee is paid to the authors of the music. The figure shows that the percentage of people willing to pay for online music (2%) is so low that it is hardly worthwhile for fee-based download systems.�

Online music has tremendous potential. Estimates are that in the year 2004 there will be more than 400 million CD recorders in the whole world for recording music at home. The raw material for so many millions of recordable CDs is out on the Web on file-sharing sites that elude control by record companies.