“We don’t need to be putting unsigned bands on the Net.” Although Davis said he made the decision to pursue the eMusic model independently, at the end of July, the American company approached Crunch to offer capital investment.The most difficult task, Davis said, is getting mainstream music lovers to understand MP3. Vitaminic offers free Web space to musicians, and lets the market decide whether or not they’d like to purchase, while Crunch carefully formulates deals with record companies to promote and sell specific bands via its site.”There’s so much music out there,” said John Davis, the 28-year-old general manager of Crunch. Diamond Multimedia, which makes the most popular player, the Rio, has sold 25,000 units here. Market researchers estimate that number will be in the tens of millions by 2003. Add that to the millions of Britons with a Net connection and a computer, and the marketeers see mega-money in the making.Two American companies are leading the way – MP3 and GoodNoise, which recently renamed itself eMusic.

They represent the promise of digital music, both for artists, and for record companies. eMusic sells music from artists already made popular by recording contracts and distribution deals, while MP3 promotes independent artists.In the UK, a similar dichotomy is evolving between Crunch, a London-based site launched in March, and Vitaminic, the Italian site that launched its UK operations last week. When Real Networks launched its Real Jukebox recently, 500,000 people downloaded the software within the first two days.Portable players, which retail for under pounds 100, are just starting to invade the UK. With MP3, all the music is stored on your computer’s hard drive, or in smaller, portable MP3 players.About 16 million MP3 players are in use worldwide, primarily from companies such as WinAmp that offer the software free from their websites. AOL and Yahoo bought into one of the leading MP3 sites, eMusic.

A UK-based company called Empeg is developing a car stereo that can hold more than 600 hours’ worth of MP3 music, an upgrade from their current version, which holds 340 hours.MP3’s potential is huge – no more need for bulky “compact” discs, no more cassette tapes eaten to oblivion by a car stereo, no more record collections hurled out of top- floor windows by ex-girlfriends. Samsung Electronics is developing a cellphone that plays the files. This industry, just beginning to sprout up in Europe, is attempting to make peace with the record labels, while keeping fans happy with plenty of legal MP3 files.The industry as a whole seems to have settled down to accepting MP3 as the format of choice. In the last few months Cductive , a popular CD site, started offering 500 tracks on the format from its website Amazon is giving away free MP3 files to promote CDs. MP3’s detractors, mainly the Recording Industry Association of America, point to the many illegal MP3 files floating around the Net, saying that since the files can be copied and sent on at will, it prevents artists from making money from their works.But while the RIAA and other bodies attempt to develop a competing format to MP3 that they can more easily control, MP3 is fast becoming the de facto standard for distributing musical files on a growing number of websites. Over the last two years, MP3 has swept through American college campuses, on to the world’s stock exchanges and into the public consciousness through a much-publicised battle that has pitted independent recording artists against the record companies that made them famous.Fans of the format, while admitting that the quality isn’t perfect, laud the fact that any artist with a website can distribute his or her music to an international audience. Italy’s largest distributor of online music arrived in the UK last week, complete with an ear-splitting launch party that shook the windows out of an East End warehouse.