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Like many other industries, music companies have been struggling with the effects of the Internet on their business. Unlike most others, however, they had to contend with the fact that users were distributing their product for them- without actually paying the companies a penny for it.

You could argue that the music industry was slow to respond creatively to this threat by offering an online service of its own. Of course, the record companies aren't entirely stupid, and they know that sooner or later the Internet is going to be their future sales channel. But they face the eternal problem of every traditional organisation faced with the Internet: that of protecting their existing business without missing out on new opportunities. So far, their record in balancing what consumers want from online services with what they want to give is poor, as services like Pressplay limit what the user can

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do with their music. Enter Apple, which thanks to its lack of vested interest is in a perfect position to create a service that is more balanced in favour of the consumer. Hopefully, we'll see it in Europe soon.

The music business is just the first traditional media industry to be hit in this way, but it won't be the last. Next is likely to be book publishing. Thanks to advances in optical character recognition and scanning, it's no longer a huge job to scan in a book and digitise its text. Already, if you know where to look, you can find huge amounts of pirated books in text, PDF, Palm, or Microsoft Reader formats, including just about every title on the current bestseller lists. It's only a matter of time before someone adapts a file-sharing service to better meet the needs of readers. Then the publishing companies will be faced with another Napster - and, given that book publishing is hardly a wildly profitable industry, some of them may end up forced out of business because of it.

And books won't be the end of it. Every kind of content provider, from music to films to magazines, is going to have to face the prospect of their content being passed freely from machine to machine when the user wants. If you're involved in content creation, you can bet that within a few years peer-to-peer file-sharing will affect you. Smart companies and individuals will already be planning ways to make money in a world where their work can be as easily passed around as an MP3 is today.