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Executives are concerned that they have yielded too much power to Apple, which has about 70 per cent of the worldwide market.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has used his position of strength to resist the labels' desire to maximise revenues, by charging more for some downloads and less for archive material. Apple insists that the one-price-fits-all policy makes the process of using iTunes as simple (and trustworthy) as possible, and it is hard to argue with the evidence that its success provides.

When the first major signed the deal with Jobs to let Apple launch the iTunes Music Store, the labels

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envisaged using the relatively small Mac market as a test bed. They had no idea that the iTunes-coupled iPod phenomenon would, within the space of two years, revolutionise the global music market.

They are now hoping that mobile phones will enable them to impose the kind of pricing structure Apple is resisting and the signs are that carriers are amenable.

'The carriers' economics are aligned with us much better than Apple is,' one anonymous executive told News.com.

However Apple's strength lies in the combination of its iTunes software and iPod hardware - a combination that even the most innovative of phone manufacturers will find hard to match, never mind beat. There are all sorts of problems with a phone-based approach that have yet to be addressed: What happens if you lose it? Will you be able to backup music to and play it on a PC (since phone downloads will have their own DRM) or will you have to pay twice? What happens when a phone's limited storage capacity is full? How easy will it be to organise large catalogues on a tiny screen? And so on.