"So far, the mobile world has been spared the massive assault on revenues that has plagued the record industry. Having said that, despite said assault, CD sales do continue to rise, so there's some muddled thinking going on somewhere.

There have been quite a lot of small experiments, niche sites and geeky mobile users swapping files and ringtones, but it's far from moving into the mass market. You could get your hands on, for instance, a cracked N-Gage game within a week of launch, if you know where to look.

But I predict that this cottage industry will boom in 2005 as kids get fed up of paying three times more for a few notes than they get charged for downloading the whole track at legitimate sites like iTunes."