Research into music downloading and surrounding issues is being undertaken by an MBA student at the University of Westminster. The title of the project is 'An Analysis of the Effectiveness of Subscription Services in Counteracting Illegal Downloads of Music from the Internet'.

The music industry has been fighting illegal downloading of music since Napster and it continues to fight on many fronts, legal, technical, PR and others. For the first time in the industry's history they are not in charge - the consumer is - and they simply don't seem to know how to handle it.

Their latest way of dealing with it is setting up subscription services. A few of them now have content from all of the major labels, namely pressplay, Rhapsody and MusicNet. However, users of P2P services, FTP servers and other services which provide free access to music downloads are still outnumbering subscribers to the industry's services by far. Ultimately, is this going to work?

The research explores the issues involved and asks whether those who currently download for free are willing to move to subscription services. It also asks why they would and why they would not as well as exploring the demographic profile of those who download. An on-line questionnaire has been set up for the purposes of the research and anyone who downloads music for free is asked to take part by completing it. The questionnaire can be found at: www.iceland-uk.org/mba

The website also gives some further information regarding the research and an e-mail address for enquiries.