Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Does the music industry see the glass as half full or half empty? Surely, it has to be the former based on yesterday's reports that Robbie Williams will trouser £80 million from EMI Records. Robbie's a bit of lad, plays football, sings (his fourth solo album, the Sinatra tribute Swing When You're Winning, sold more than 5.5 million copies) and now he signs what is believed to be the UK's biggest record deal with £10 million up front, £15 million on completion of the first record and £55 million for the remaining three records.

One thing Williams hasn't done is convinced the American market that he's more than just a cheeky chappie. On the US side of the Atlantic people reacted more in perplexity than in amazement when they heard his version of My Way. And EMI? In a year in which it paid Mariah Carey $50 million to sever her contract after the failure of the Glitter album, it has cut 1,800 jobs and endured a string of flops.

Ultimately, EMI's problem is not so much the marketing of Robbie Williams and the recovery of its investment, but the rise of Kazaa. Over five million copies of its upgraded file sharing software, Kazaa V2, were downloaded last week and with more than 120 million downloads so far, it has become one of the most popular pieces of software ever created.

Although EMI, Warner Music and the others managed to shut down Napster, their celebrations can't have been that euphoric because Kazaa V2 is Napster on steroids. Its new "playlist" search function effectively provides a simple way to download entire albums at once rather than track by track, and by allowing users to rate files for quality, V2 helps them spot dummy or corrupted versions of files planted by the record companies to frustrate would-be downloaders.

File-swappers should note, however, that "free" often comes at a price today and that means "parasite-ware", sometimes called "stealware", which piggybacks on the installation. In the case of Kazaa, the parasite is SaveNow. Still, it's easy to remove from the Windows operating system. Just click on Start. Click on Settings. Click on Control Panel. Double-click on Add/Remove Programs. Click on SaveNow. Click on Add/Remove.

John Schwartz and Bob Tedeschi wrote an excellent article for the New York Times (registration required) called "New Software Quietly Diverts Sales Commissions". They point out the perils of "parasite-ware", identify the main culprits and show how they can be removed from one's computer.