AS OVER 10,000 bods from the music business gathered in the south of France last week for the annual Midem networking festival, the issue of digital rights management was to the forefront of most debates.

How on earth is the record industry going to regain control over the distribution of music and still manage to make money? All sorts of proposals have been mooted, including the possibility of allowing free sharing of downloaded music. Industry leaders have to begin thinking like the publishers, was one of the oft-repeated mantras.

Of course, as it stands, the legal download market is facing tumult. Last week, Norway made iTunes illegal because, it said, it impinges on consumers' rights. This is the first time such a ruling has been made and it is expected that if, on 1 October, Apple, which dominates the download market with about 90% of sales, hasn't made its codes available to all other MP3 players to use its iTunes software, that it will be forced to shut down operations there. Other Scandinavian countries, and possibly even France and Germany, could very conceivably follow suit.

The pressure, then, is on the market leader and with the popularity of phone downloads rising (Vodafone claimed 18% of the Irish top 40 singles chart last week while Nokia has set up its own version of iTunes), Microsoft has just launched its rival to the iPod, the Zune MP3 player.

Microsoft challenging a dominant player to open up its platform? Ironic isn't?