Labels fear release of 100-hour albums! Piracy celebrates!

The recording industry has condemned the launch of two recording systems that will allow people to record between 320 and 100 hours of music on a single disc. The launches, offered by electronics giants Sony and Philips, are being seen as a potential paradise for pirates.

"It's an obvious idea. Anything that allows people to pirate even more music, like these launches, is certainly bad news for the recording industry," said a spokesperson for BPI, the British record labels' trade organization. The launches come at a time of the most serious crisis for the recording industry since the launch of CDs. Free online downloading and disc copying systems have been widely pointed to as responsible for the sector's falling sales.

Sony's system will employ the ultra-efficient data compression method already used in MiniDiscs to accumulate 30 hours of music in MP3 format on a single blank CD. The discs can be played on a new generation of personal sound devices, costing less than 100 pounds. The system proposed by Philips employs a DVD recorder connected to a computer, and allows recording up to 100 hours of music in MP3 format on a blank DVD, which can be played on a portable DVD player.

That Sony would be interested in launching a recorder that could make piracy easier may seem surprising, since its Sony Music division produces and sells CDs. Although Sony Music chose not to comment on the launch by its sister company, Mike Tsurumi, president of Sony Consumer Electronics in Berlin, insists the idea makes sense. "Music industry companies need to change their business model," he claims.

A colleague of Tsurumi's, Simon Mori, hopes people will start downloading music from official, paid record label websites. One such site was launched last week by the British telecom group BT and 30 record labels (www.dotmusic.com), although the price of 1.49 pounds per track hardly makes buying music cheap under this system.

The International Federation for the Phonographic Industry, a trade organization tirelessly pursuing music pirates worldwide, has not yet announced how it intends to react to the new recording systems.