As the world embraces legalised music downloading, South Africans look forward to the opening of Africa's first online download music store.

Europe already has a download music chart that monitors the most popular music tracks as downloaded by consumers, and not as determined by the music industry, music stores or radio stations.

Music downloading has been a popular way for millions of internet users to acquire the latest hits, often faster than local music stores can unpack their most recent shipment of album releases.

Courtesy of Shaun Fanning, founder and developer of the once popular peer-to-peer file- sharing software Napster, the world learnt the cheapest, not often easiest, way to downloading quality MP3 music with messy tags - and the music industry awakened to its greatest nightmare

Legal downloads are having a postive effect

"Free" music was all the rage, with MP3 internet searches finally surpassing pornography searches on internet search sites about four years ago.

But with this illegal sharing of files came new fears - spyware, viruses, prosecution and the bankrupting of many artists who just couldn't compete with the sheer volume of internet sharing.

It was free but no one denied the risks and consequences associated with file sharing.

The music industry fought back, shutting down Napster's servers but falling short of destroying the huge Kazaar and Gnutella PC-to-PC networks that replaced Fanning's empire.

Then Apple's Steve Jobs launched the world's first MP3 megastore - legal music acquired via a trusted source, using reliable and secure software, downloaded to a mobile device that neatly packed your tune selection into categorised playlists.

The world was introduced to Apple's iTunes and its iPod became the world's hottest portable music player since Morita Akio drove the development and marketing of Sony's most successful product, the humble Walkman, in the 1980s.

Jobs's success was based on selling music at an affordable price (about R6.50 per track or R93 an album) and allowing the user to customise their selection.

Customisation means you have to buy only the tracks you want, not the entire album.

Local stores such as Audiovision at the Waterfront say they are unable to keep up with the demand for iPods and iPod Mini players, which cost between R2 200 and R4 000 a pod.

Claremont-based Apple supplier, Project 3 echoed Audiovision's sentiment: "Demand is definitely exceeding supply. Last Friday we received 15 iPods, 13 went the same day," said owner Alan Goldberg.

Not to be outdone by Jobs, Roxio (the new owners of Fanning's flogged file-sharing empire) has retaliated with Napster 2.0, with Samsung launching a co-branded 20GB jukebox that is specifically suited for the new service's features.

Sony has joined the online MP3 megastore business with Sony Connect that uses the multinational's SonicStage software, already familiar to millions of Sony MiniDisc (MD) users around the world.

The service uses Sony's proprietary music compression format, ATRAC3, that's rife with music digital rights management policing and safeguards to prevent file sharing.

Although many DRM issues have been relaxed since the service was first launched, it still lags behind iTunes and Napster in that it does not conform to the most popular format, MP3.

Local music download nutters can click on to Mweb Entertainment. It has secured an exclusive deal with SAMP3, which delivers the latest South African tunes for free to Mweb subscribers for a period of two weeks after release. Thereafter anyone can download the music directly from SAMP3.com.

Mweb's portal manager, Chris Roper, believes that although foreign megastores have not yet arrived in Africa, there is a local demand for such a service.

"We're offering a local service with SAMP3 because it was something we could broker, but things are not as easy with international music. There are often complex music rights issues governing the international music downloads," he said.

"Things will change, but for now the interest of these large online stores are firstly the USA and then Europe, naturally because these remain the most lucrative markets in the world."

According to one record label, BMG, the move towards legal downloads is having a positive effect on the music industry.

"It is evident from a number of international examples that consumers are willing to pay money for music downloads, real tones and various other mobile applications that exist and the same would apply from a South African perspective," said the label's national sales director, Russell Crawford.

"Bandwidth, however, is a problem here in SA," he added, "with only the real top end of the local internet market having access to fast data speeds."

About illegal music downloads, Crawford said, "Locally it is impacting on our industry, but not nearly as bad as CD burning or cassette piracy actually is."

He remains upbeat about the future of record labels and music: "We see ourselves as content providers ... whether on-line or in-store."

Know the lingo

3GPP/3GP - 3rd Generation Partnership Project

A format being used in cellphones and other mobile devices for (mainly) video encoding.

ACC - Advanced Audio Coding

A next-generation audio compression system that forms part of the new MP4 multimedia standard.

ATRAC3 - Acoustic Transform Adaptive Coding 3

Sony's proprietary music compression technology, first used with the MiniDisc (MD) but now the only format used by all Sony digital music players. This could change.

Bitrate

The level of data compression in an audio or video file. The rate chosen will determine the quality of your playback.

Burning

The process of recording a CD-R (recordable CD), RW-CD (re-writeable CD) or DVD-R (recordable DVD).

Codec - Compressor/decompressor

The technology for shrinking audio or video data for storage or for transfer over a network or internet. Common codecs include MP3 (audio) and MP4 (video).

DRM - Digital Rights Management

Various software and hardware methods used to prevent the reproduction and sharing of copyrighted material.

H.323

A protocol for the transmission of real-time audio, video and data information over networks, company networks and metropolitan and wide area networks.

MP3 - MPEG-1 Layer 3

The most popular audio (music) codec. Compression is achieved by discarding those parts of the sound that are (supposedly) inaudible to our ears.

P2P - Peer-to-peer

A system of computer networking that requires no servers. PCs talk directly to one another. As music downloading moves from PC to cellphone, this could come to mean phone-to-phone.

Playlist

Very much a "this century" term referring to a list of digitised songs arranged for playback on a music system.

Ripping

The process of transferring music from a CD to a PC's hard drive. This process usually uses some codec system.

Streaming

When music or video files are held on a remote server that allows for playback before the entire file has been downloaded.

This system works well with small devices such as cellphones that have limited memory, as the play portion is discarded.

Tethered downloading

A downloaded file with DRM, which becomes available only once it is paid for.

WMA -Windows Music Audio

Similar to MP3, developed by Microsoft.