The shocking headlines this month in the tech world are: 'Music Industry Explores New Approach to Online Downloads' and 'Online growth offsets struggles in print for newspapers'.

Shocking only because it is taking two 'old' businesses a long time to finally coming around to embracing the inevitable. Instead of embracing the Internet as another mode of communication, the news media and music industry has tended to regard the technology as a threat.

They are right, but only so far as they stood back and let a lot of other cream off the early benefits. Now they have a lot more competition from a lot of unlikely sources.

For the music industry, worried about the unlimited copying of tracks, the excuse has been that it does not have the fail safe encryption technology to prevent piracy. Yet it never did all the way through vinyl, tapes and CDs.

Last week in Cannes, France the annual music industry meeting discussed how to develop those new business models to offset the dramatic fall of CD sales. The evidence was there in front of them, with Qtrax, which launched this week, saying it has up to 25 million copyrighted tracks available for free music download.

Qtrax is betting that advertising will pay the way for you to listen to the tunes.

You have to download a special player to get the music. Still some are still holding out from licensing online music sellers and distributors. The big four music companies have all said they would not licence Qtrax, which launched with the rather premature announcement that the CD was dead.

Deezer is another one of those services and one I use regularly to set up a listing of favourite tunes, all legal. Deezer is interesting in that it is developing a new model in which it is free to listen to a good number of tracks, but to get the full offering you must pay a monthly sign up fee.

CBS Corp. has gone about the same way with its Last.fm website, which also has free streaming music supported by advertising. Last.fm has agreements with the four biggest record companies and offers about 3.5 million tracks.

Perhaps one day all music will be online and we can then stream it anytime we want through our various devices. A connected stereo/video system could be a feature of every home.

Why store music on precious memory space when it could be always available all the time, perhaps on a personal web space? We would no longer be stuck with the concept of 'music ownership', in that I own this CD and you own that one.

Music after all is a collective experience, or it mostly used to be. And if you are worried about the dumbing down of music quality, it has already happened. Many music companies are boosting the sound levels on their CD offerings, especially for the more bass driven modes, thereby diminishing the quality of the more subtle sounds. Message to the music industry: stay with quality, develop alternate services and do something to end consumer sentiment they are being ripped off anyway.

People who feel ripped off tend to believe this gives them the right to get back at the music companies. In a sense the music companies have criminalised a whole generation. Making your customers angry generally does not pay off as any experienced business person will tell you.

Newspapers face a more serious problem in that on one hand they are losing readership of the hard copy, and subsequently advertising revenue, and gaining a confusing array of competitors on the internet. The industry might have to reinvent itself based on lower revenue base. Niche specialised news sites sucking out revenue online. It's hard to read the sentiment of the masses.

One way out of the logjam would be for newspapers to also develop niche sites based on their traditional 'sections'. The trick will be to keep up the quality of reporting, a tough deal.

News sites are attracting record numbers of readers, but how to convert that gross figure into a revenue stream is the task of today's media executives. According to Scarborough Research, newspaper websites can increase their overall readership by as much as 15 percent by attracting younger and more affluent readers. Scarborough even claims that its research shows the exclusive online news reader may even be attracted into actually buying the hardcopy.

There is still hope that hacks like myself will not grow mouldy in our chosen profession! Watch this space, somewhere.

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