Napster, which pioneered illegal music downloading, surprised the record industry yesterday by unveiling a legitimate UK Web site, its first outside the United States. The company has signed a deal with five major record labels and a number of independent firms to offer a catalog of 500,000 tracks for sale over the Internet, rising to 700,000 within a month.

It is a far cry from the original Napster, founded in 1999 by a U.S. college student, Shawn Fanning, which allowed users to download tracks for free. Napster's name and assets were bought by Roxio, a software company based in Silicon Valley, after a US court ruled in July 2001 that the Web site had broken copyright laws. Chris Gorog, the chairman of Roxio, said yesterday: "Napster, perhaps more than anything else, shows what the internet can do. Napster invented online music -- it set the bar. From our research we know that the original Napster user wanted instant access to a range of music and we have remained true to that."

Paying More for Tracks

British music fans will not, however, be pleased to hear that they are paying considerably more for tracks from napster.co.uk than their American counterparts. Subscription to the service, which went live yesterday, costs pounds 9.95 a month for an unlimited number of tracks.
For an extra 99p a track, or pounds 9.95 an album, consumers can burn records to portable music players. Customers who do not want to subscribe can choose instead to pay pounds 1.09 for an individual track, or pounds 9.95 for an album. The U.S. subscription rate is $9.95 (pounds 5.5.

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