If you’ve paid your own money for a CD album of one of your favourite artists, should you have the right to put that album onto your MP3 player? After all, you’ve paid the fee; you’ve given the artist your money and bought the album legally. If you want to listen to it on a CD player, an MP3 player or even a cassette player, you should be able to.

It’s not fair that you’d be expected to buy the album again, on every format available to you. The UK music industry doesn’t agree though. It’s not happy that UK consumers can purchase music on CD, and then copy the music they have paid for onto their MP3 players.

The UK Government has proposed that it be made legal to transfer music onto you iPod or MP3 player without any kind of levy, or tax. The UK music industry disagrees.

We acknowledge that consumers clearly want to format shift and also place enormous value on the transferability of music. Music fans clearly deserve legal clarity in this area as well as the freedom to enjoy any music they have legitimately obtained.

What the UK music industry would like to see is a tax on MP3 players and iPods when consumers purchase them, knowing that they will be used to copy music at some point.

This is actually quite common as many European countries actually charge a levy on blank media, which acts as compensation.