Napster is about to expand into Germany, MTV is starting an online music store in the United States, and mobile phone companies are hard at work turning their handsets into pseudo iPods.
Not a bad overture for an industry whose sales have been falling for years, whose leading companies have been cutting jobs and the number of artists on their books, and which has irritated its customers by suing 7,000 of them around the world for copyright infringement.
As the annual global music trade show, Midem, which opened here over the weekend, digital music was one of the few things record labels had to sing about, even though it accounted for less than 2 percent of total revenue last year.
When the official numbers for 2004 come in over the next couple of weeks, they are expected to show that the global music business was flat, probably saved from another declining year only by a slight blip up in digital music sales, several industry veterans said here.
