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The deal between Napster and the mighty Bertelsmann's BMG music label has not ended free music on the internet. In fact, it seems only to have intensified the question of how to get consumers to spend money online.

Fans have flooded message boards and chat rooms with notes accusing Napster of selling out to corporate interests and promising that they will now find other sources of free tunes.

Leaving aside the existence of other free file-sharing programs, such as Gnutella, the biggest issue of all is users' willingness to pay for music which they could once get free.

As well as developing an authentication method for access to the new service, Napster and BMG will need a way to prevent users who are connected to the new service from swapping illegal files. This would involve watermarking legally downloaded songs and producing software to weed out files without the mark.

This means the new service probably won't see the light of day for at least 12 to 18 months, by which time the market might have shifted dramatically.

It is one of the paradoxes of the internet that the wealthiest sections of society, which make up its biggest user base, are the most reluctant to pay for anything. The Henley Centre sees it as part of a wider change in the way consumers think.

We are besieged by demands on our time and at least 37 per cent of people say they will pay for things that save them time. But nearly half of us will insist on searching for a bargain either on principle or as a form of entertainment.

If the Henley Centre is right, the relationship between money and time might work itself out in the digital arena in two parallel ways.

First, customers will pay for things that they can get more quickly via the internet. So they might not want to pay for an old tune, but they might pay for the latest Westlife single on the day before it hits the stores.

The other way that we can spend money while saving time is when we are on the move. Some of the research and forecasting in this area was revealed at a recent IQPC conference. Ordering via mobile phones seems to solve the problems of time, as well as providing an easily collectable revenue stream.

In the chart, Questus forecasts that during the next decade, the revenue derived from the mobile phone will shift away from voice calls and heavily towards m-commerce.



Nick Rosen is a director of The Online Research Agency. email: nick@online-agency. com or tel: 0797 1543703.