News arrived yesterday that the Warner Music Group is considering switching to a month-to-month deal with Apple, when its existing contract expires at the end of the year. If this goes ahead, Warner will join Universal Music in this position. A month-to-month deal allows content providers to be free to deal with other distributors.

It could lead to music appearing, then disappearing from iTunes, and perhaps also incomplete catalogues of music from artists. Users of iTunes would have to trawl other online stores to get their music, with the inevitable incompatibility and variable DRM issues. The same would probably apply to users of other distributors. There are parts of the music industry hell bent on breaking the iTunes virtual monopoly at the expense of their own survival.

This left me wondering if there is a service that currently allows me to search across lots of music distributors in one go, and pick from the one I want.

There is: it’s called BitTorrent. Hmm.