A ROW over the illegal downloading of songs looked set to break out at this weekend’s annual gathering of music moguls after the chairman of Sanctuary Group said that some file swapping and copying of music should be tolerated.

Andy Taylor, who is a 30-year veteran of the music industry, gave warning that the industry’s zealous pursuit of internet pirates risked alienating millions of music fans.

Mr Taylor said that some file swapping of music, which has been blamed for a 30 per cent decline in global music revenues over three years, had helped to expand the recording industry by allowing consumers to “investigate” music before they bought it.

“Sharing music is not necessarily a bad thing,” Mr Taylor said. Such sharing of music was “completely different to the worst element of internet piracy, which is the people who have no intention ever of spending money on music”.

The comments will reverberate across the industry as hundreds of record companies gather in Cannes for their annual trade conference, Midem, in which the biggest subject for discussion will be the fight against music piracy and illegal file swapping.

Mr Taylor’s comments clash with the position of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), which has a “zero tolerance” attitude towards piracy and file swapping.

Jay Berman, the IFPI’s chief executive, said this week that he would eradicate all piracy and file swapping if it was possible to do so. Asked if there was any way in which file swapping could be positive for the industry, Mr Berman’s answer was a resolute “no”.

However, Mr Taylor acknowledged that piracy, when taken as a whole, had damaged the music industry.

He said: “It’s the people who have no intention of spending money on music that are the ones we should be pursuing; those who are making a business out of it and copy all of their songs from the internet. That is the biggest issue, and it’s pure crime — it’s no different to any other criminal activity; it’s like forging banknotes.”

But he said extreme measures would limit people experimenting with music they had not heard. “When you lent your friend an album that was a form of file sharing,” he said.

“If people are downloading, not with the intent of making a business out of it or avoid buying albums altogether but just to investigate music, then they should be allowed to continue doing so.

“They (teenagers) don’t have the money, so they will only spend what money they have on something they really, really care about,” he said.

The problem, he conceded, was that “if people had proved to be more honest, if we could trust them, then we would have no problem”.

“We need to find a mechanism to allow them to listen to whatever music they want, to explore and investigate music, at little or no cost, while not letting the serious pirates exploit it,” he said.

The technology that allows consumers to listen to music over the internet without downloading it might be one solution. Among the available services, Apple’s iTunes online music store allows customers to listen to 30-second snippets of songs, while Coca-Cola’s new mycokemusic service lets users hear a song live for 1p.

Bold new era of downloads

The era of legal music downloading has arrived. This spring sees a flood of new services launching in Europe, including Apple’s iTunes, RealNetworks’ Rhapsody, Roxio’s resurrected Napster and a new service from Sony.

The legal music download services will be coupled with a flurry of marketing spending as each jostles to try to grab an early stranglehold on what is expected to become a multibillion-pound market. The first legal downloads became available in 2002.