subscription-based services which provide some revenue stream to deal with the royalty issue. Expectations that legal protection would limit the impact of this revolution have been dampened by a US Court of Appeal ruling which rejected claims that P2P violated copyright law. Their judgement said, ‗ History has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a PC, a karaoke machine or an MP3 player‘( Personal Computer World, November 2004, p. 32). Significantly the new opportunities opened up by this were seized not by music industry firms but by computer companies, especially Apple. In parallel with the launch of their successful iPod personal MP3 player they opened a site called iTunes which offered users a choice of thousands of tracks for download at 99c each. In its first weeks of operation it recorded 1 million hits and in February 2006 the billionth song, ‗ Speed of Sound‘, was purchased as part of Coldplay‘ s X & Y album by Alex Ostrovsky from West Bloomfield, Michigan. ‗ I hope that every customer, artist, and music company executive takes a moment today to reflect on what we‘ ve achieved together during the past three years,‘ said Steve Jobs, Apple‘ s CEO. ‗ Over 1 billion songs have now been legally purchased and downloaded around the globe, representing a major force against music piracy and the future of music distribution as we move from CDs to the Internet.‘ This has been a dramatic shift, reaching the point where more singles were bought as downloads in 2005 than as CDs, and where the overall shift to a majority of purchases being by download was expected to take place during 2006. New players are coming to dominate the game – for example, Tesco and Microsoft. And the changes don‘ t stop there. In February 2006 the Arctic Monkeys topped the UK album charts and walked off with a fistful of awards from the music business – yet their rise to prominence had been entirely via ‗ viral marketing‘ across the Internet rather than by conventional advertising and promotion. Playing gigs around the northern English town of Sheffield, the band simply gave away CDs of their early songs to their fans, who then obligingly spread them around on the Internet. ‗ They