FIVE years ago, prominent figures in the music industry began proclaiming that downloading would kill the music industry.

Indeed, so commonplace was this assumption that the heavy metal giants Metallica even wrote a song about the download website Napster, which contained the verse “Evil Napster, so dangerous/Stealing bread right from my mouth/ T3 lines they are my bane/ Evil Napster I wish you never came” — a protest which had surprisingly little effect in convincing the world’s youth that taking a stroll to the shops to buy Metallica’s new album was, on the whole, a better idea than downloading it free.

This month, however, the hugely successful British launch of the official, legal, download sites iTunes and MyCokeMusic.com finally made downloading a newly profitable arm of the music industry.

It turned out that the main attraction of downloading was not that it was free, merely that it was convenient.

Music fans have been rushing to hand over 79p per track and downloading is now seen as the potential saviour of the music industry — a bummer for Metallica, who will now have to rhyme “MyCokeMusic” with “We recommend you use it”.

Yesterday’s release of the first download chart would seem to corroborate the issue of downloading’s potential: of the Top 20 singles listed, ten were previously in the normal, corporeal, charts. Indeed, two — White Flag by Dido and Hey Ya! by Outkast — were released nine and seven months ago, respectively. From the music industry’s point of view, this is very good news indeed. It means that there is an audience out there who will buy Dido and Outkast songs only if they can download them.

A whole new market has been created out of thin air and at a time when the singles market is in a crisis of long-term low sales.

Singles that were thought to be dead and over are being reactivated and given new leases of life again by downloading.

It is also clear that the demographic that downloads singles is very different to the demographic that buys them. The flesh-and-blood Top 40 has the boy band McFly as its No 1 act this week.

The download charts, on the other hand, have the Pixies, the seminal band from the late Eighties who were Kurt Cobain’s main inspiration in forming Nirvana.

It seems that the download charts are the stomping ground of “£50 Man”: the marketing demographic that describes culturally clued-up men in their 30s and 40s who have £50 in their pocket and are torn between a DVD, a computer game or now, it seems, a downloading spree.

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