Who should be afraid of free? The decimation of the music industry is often held up as the cautionary tale for all other areas of the media. But a decade on from the launch of file-sharing service Napster, with a member of the Pirate party sitting in the European parliament, it is worth recalling the peculiar set of circumstances that cooked the record label goose, and the mistakes that prevented it climbing out of the pot.

First, it was consumers who took control of the digitisation process. Individuals took the opportunity presented by the improvement of technology to start transferring libraries of CDs on to increasingly large and affordable hard drives.