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The network, to be known Peer Impact, is a closed service that allows people to share music tracks. When a track is transferred, the downloader is billed for the music as with a familiar downloads service such as iTunes.

The beauty of the service, at least from the providers' point of view, is that the music fans use their own bandwidth to download songs whilst still paying for each track downloaded. Thus, for the music industry, it becomes a very cheap way to distribute music.

Greg Kerber, chairman and CEO of Wurld Media said, 'The online media market is presently split between authorized legal paid-download services

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and unauthorized free services; the consumer is stuck somewhere in the middle, and that's where Peer Impact comes in. From the beginning our objective has been to reach out to the consumer and help build a secure and legal file-sharing community, created by - and for - the fan, but which also ensures that digital-rights owners get compensated.'

Quite how 'secure and legal' the system will be is open to question. Part of the risk of using p2p file sharing networks is that you never quite know what you are downloading. It may be a bad copy or completely the wrong tune altogether, but as it is 'free', no-one bothers so much. Customers may be a bit more aggravated to find that the latest Eminem song they downloaded and paid for turns out to be the Tweenies.

As the music companies continually remind us, there is also the danger with p2p networks that there may be all sorts of viruses and spyware lurking in downloaded digital music. Once again, a downloader may be less than happy to find that the music they just bought came with a free Trojan.

Unless Peer Impact can allay those kinds of fears, people may just decide that if they are going to pay for stuff, they might as well go to iTunes.