Universal, the world’s largest record label, is still a stranger to how music lovers behave in the digital era. It thinks it has come to terms with the age of the download by announcing that it will test a program for selling music without digital rights management (DRM) software over the next six months. Universal seems to believe that scrapping DRM will lead to millions happily downloading songs at £1 a go. Universal is mistaken.

Most people who are vaguely computer literate are already downloading its songs for nothing. Any hit record released on a Universal imprint – including Polydor, Decca, Philips, Fontana and A&M – is already available online and without DRM, because anyone can burn a CD. Though the music industry would love to think otherwise, simply selling DRM-free music online won’t change that.

It is pretty hard to feel sorry for an industry that initially gained so much from the technological revolution. The introduction of the compact disc meant that its profits in the Eighties increased sevenfold. Yet though the apparently indestructible new format convinced the world to ditch scratchy old vinyl and repurchase its music, the industry didn’t emerge bathed in bonhomie and benevolence. To the consumer, the ugly “home taping is killing music” logo still disfigured new products. Musicians signing to one leading label still had to give up profit in a breakage clause. This little cracker referred to the losses the label would incur through records snapping in transit; the breakage clause referred to 78s. The company that still used this clause in the late Eighties was formed in 1962, two years after the last 78 was manufactured in Britain.

The music industry almost seems to go out of its way to be unloveable. While you can sympathise with its battle against piracy, Universal is selling its DRM-free music through Amazon, RealNetworks, and retailers such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart – but not Apple’s iTunes store. Although Doug Morris, Universal chairman and CEO, claims that the company is “committed to offering consumers the most choice in how and where they purchase and enjoy our music”, that choice doesn’t include the iTunes Store or the iPod.

“These devices are just repositories for stolen music and they all know it,” says Mr Morris, the man who wrote the Chiffons’ Sweet Talkin’ Guy in 1966. This may come as something of a shock to people who have been uploading their dozens of indestructible compact discs, bought at £15 a pop over the years.

Still it isn’t as shocking as the copy controlled CD, the bright idea some labels came up with at the start of the decade that ensured some discs wouldn’t play in your computer.

Apple is just as guilty as Universal in refusing to concede ground. It has its own FairPlay DRM to protect copyright owners – and its own iTunes Store for music players other than the iPod – even though this can be neutralised by burning to CD and creating an MP3. The “exclusives” that iTunes makes available within minutes of release are always on illegal download sites such as Kazaa.

The industry’s ultra-defensive tactics could do with a little forward thinking. No one knows where the music industry will be in five years. One short-term solution, apart from dropping DRM in music completely, would be for iTunes to sell songs much more cheaply. Convenience is everything. While a 14-year-old has hours of free time to sniff out the best quality, free download, those with limited time – people who work and thus have a bit of spare change – are the only ones likely to spend a quid to purchase a song from the iTunes store. If songs were 10p, even 20p, a throw even cash-strapped, time-rich kids would be more likely to pay for the facility.

Also, iTunes could drastically improve the audio quality of downloads. While I’m quite happy to listen to a compressed, lo-fi rockabilly recording from 1957, the same would hardly be true of a state-of-the art 2007 recording. As Bob Dylan said in a recent Rolling Stone interview, promoting his new DRM-loaded album Modern Times: “You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like – static.”

The British hi-fi company Linn also has a record label that specialises in classical, jazz and Celtic music. It recently started offering downloads that are the equivalent of super audio CDs. Though the prices are a little higher than iTunes, Linn has no copy restrictions. Its site seems excited and enthusiastic about the new technology – compare this with the part Ned Ludd, part Eric Cartman, outbursts of Doug Morris.

Dylan also told Rolling Stone: “We all like records that are played on record players, but let’s face it, those days are gon-n-n-e.” On the contrary, vinyl is on the up. If the growth of the CD made music seem that much smaller, the download has pushed it off the map entirely. Without a physical product, music becomes like air – no wonder people are loath to pay for it. Pop consumers, teenagers, have swung back to the spiritual beauty of the 7in-single, the album. To walk to school with one under your arm is a badge of honour. Downloads, by comparison, are so uncool.

The industry may dismiss this as a fleeting trend, but one group is taking it very seriously indeed. Having decided that no digital format is stable enough for posterity, the Church of Scientology has been pressing the collected thoughts of L. Ron Hubbard on to futuristic, nondigital, unbreakable, good old-fashioned vinyl.

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