OK. Record companies just don't know what to do with themselves. They're all sat around scared stiff, hands-a-trembling and pointing at photographs of computers and saying "That. That. It's killing us! What about my coke habit?!" Well, Sony think they have the answer.

The back catalogues of bands and artists on Sony, which include Mark Ronson, The Hoosiers and Foo Fighters, are to be made available to listen to free on the We7 website. The site offers music downloads free of charge, with each track preceded by a short advert, which generates revenue instead of fans paying for downloads. The adverts disappear from each piece music 30 days from the download date. So it is going to stop people pinching stuff with BitTorrent and the like?

Well, Sony BMG have pledged to make over 250,000 tracks in its back catalogue available on the site. However, the tracks will not be available to download, as others available on the service are. Instead they will be streamed in full while a user is online. The label hopes that after listening to the full track streams users will buy downloads of the songs.

So in short, no, it's not going to stop anyone from stealing songs because one, you can't download them onto your MP3 player and two, you'll be pig sick of listening to adverts after 3 tracks. [via NME]

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