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Although legal downloads jumped by 900 per cent in 2004, according to the industry body IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), and has a global value that Jupiter Research puts at more than £200 million, downloading remains a drop in the ocean compared to the overall music market. What, experts are asking, is holding it back?

The prime cause for consternation among many consumers stems from digital rights management (DRM). 'I recently bought five albums from Napster and couldn't get them to work,' said Sean Prior, a 34-year-old music fan from Croydon. 'Eventually, I got them to play - the licences were in the wrong place and I had to download them again - but it's much too hard. I've also bought tracks from another store, but you can download them to only one computer; when I had my laptop stolen, I lost the tracks I'd paid for.'

The number of machines you can download to varies between stores, as do the portable players you're able to use, and whether you're allowed to make a backup CD. Consumers no longer own the tracks they've paid for.

'Digital music sales make up less than 2 per cent of the total music business, because many consumers know they aren't really buying the music - they're renting it from a big corporation that controls what software, computer and portable devices they can use,' said Michael Robertson, who recently launched the DRM-free MP3tunes.com.

Songs, he said, should be 'permanently stored in a customer's music locker, so they never lose the music they paid for.'

Such is the furore surrounding the restrictions placed on downloads that two of the biggest players, Apple and Sony, face court action in Europe over the alleged anti-competitive practice that ties music downloaded from their sites to their music players.

What's even more frustrating for anyone that falls foul of DRM is that it simply doesn't work. Although the music industry admits DRM is only a 'speedbump' to stop casual copying, anyone can break the locks imposed on music - because unlike most encryption, the attacker must be given the 'key' in order to play their music.

'DRM systems are usually broken in minutes, sometimes

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days and rarely months. It's not because the people who think them up are stupid, or that those that crack them are smart,' said Cory Doctorow, a lawyer with the rights campaign group Electronic Frontier Foundation. 'There isn't even a problem with the algorithms.'

'All DRM systems share a common vulnerability: they provide attackers (in this case customers) with the ciphertext, the cipher and the key. At this point, it isn't a secret any more.'

Napster's new unlimited download mobile service is a case in point. Just days after the £15-per-month rent-a-tune download service was launched, users realised that by using Winamp software they could capture streams of music they had downloaded from the Napster site and store it permanently with no DRM.
The supposed restrictions imposed by the download companies are only half the story, however. The price and the quality of products are also keeping consumers' credit cards in their pockets.

Anyone who takes their music seriously has doubts about the quality of music offered by download sites. The uncompressed files on a CD weigh in at between 500MB and 600MB. The encoding used for MP3 trims the file size of an album by 90 per cent. But for all the advances in compression technology, anyone with half an ear for music can detect the lack of depth in their songs.

As Stereophile magazine reader Bill Contreras put it: 'iPods and similar devices quite frankly represent all that I, as an audiophile, have come to despise. In the end, I'd rather listen to no music at all than resort to listening to playback from a compressed-audio device.'

Stereophile's Wes Philips goes so far as to compare the sound quality of downloads to music recorded and sold during the 1970s. That doesn't mean there's no place for MP3s, just that many music fans don't regard them as representing value as a paid-for product.

'MP3s are fine for most uses, particularly for making a backup, but you do lose sound quality during compression,' said musician Martin Davey. 'Yes, you can up the bit-rate when you copy your own CDs, but many music sites are offering tracks recorded at just 128Kb/sec - that's nowhere near CD quality.'
So why would anyone want to buy a download, when for only a pound or so more they can buy a CD, receive a better- quality product that's boxed and doesn't come riddled with restrictions on its use?
Perhaps that's why CD sales - far from dying, as some predictions exaggerated - increased by 7 per cent last year, according to Nielsen Research.

Stores such as Napster and iTunes can't compete on price against the illegal file-sharing networks, which continue to flourish, and they're beaten on quality by CDs. They're fighting two competitors, and currently losing on both fronts.