Although the pundits out there will tell you that CDs are all but obsolete thanks to music downloads and filesharing, it looks like consumer opinion has something else to say about the matter. About half the people asked in a survey by ISP PlusNet predicted that CDs will be around for at least 10 more years.

Wishful thinking in the era of filesharing and BitTorrent? Perhaps. About 10% of the group surveyed thought that CDs will be around forever. While it’s unlikely that all the world’s CDs will disappear at some point, as a medium for buying music on, CDs probably won’t be popular forever.

CD sales dropped about 10% last year, compared with about three million legal MP3 downloads in the last week of 2007, according to figures from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI).

Neil Armstrong, products director at PlusNet, came out with some obvious statements, saying that online legal MP3 downloads have became popular in the UK. No way. Who knew?

It looks like there is still life in CDs, but the vital signs are fading as legal MP3 downloads begin to take over the music industry.

When iPhone 3G hits the market this fall in spite of disappointing some of its customers who just spent $200 -$300 more on the recent upgrade to the 16 gig, its going to really test the band width capability of the AT and T network. Data plan is going to cost more but without delivering the promised speed, its going to be a very difficult proposition for AT and T. In the mean time their is another story evolving in other side of the continent. Japans #1 and #3 carriers are fighting for the bragging rights, to who gets the deal with Apple. Suddenly the tides have shifted in Apples favor, long gone days of Steve looking out for the best carrier to carry his iPhone. Just in a few months the data war will begin and then all of a sudden the data providers will be calling their shots too.

Yet another filesharing service has hit the web this week. This time around, we’ve got Shazzle to get to grips with. The name doesn’t inspire us much, but the service offers free filesharing and a range of community features to check out.

New filesharing services don’t get us too excited any more. Recently, we’ve had Omemo, which is nothing special, and QTrax, which had a disastrous launch. So what makes Shazzle any different?

The community features like messaging are a nice touch. However, a chat feature isn’t going to have us foaming at the mouth in anticipation. Shazzle is in beta now and is available for free download. It’s worth a shot and we will be testing it out to see if it’s any good.

If any of you out there have tried out this new filesharing program, let us know how you’ve got on with it. We’re still unsure about the large sheep-type creature on the homepage.

“It’s time to put the corpse of what we know as the record industry in the ground and let some other beautiful things start to grow out of it,” said Peter Gabriel his week.

The forward-thinking artist was speaking as he accepted the Personality of the Year award at the MIDEM international music conference in Cannes. Gabriel urged musicians and those in the music industry to embrace changes in technology, rather than fighting them.

The music industry has been suffering greatly at the hands of filesharing and illgeal free music downloads, but its attempts to deal with the problem have been in direct opposition to the great advance in technology that have been made over the past five years.

Gabriel is a smart guy. He recently launched We7, an internet service offering legal, free music downloads. The free music downloads are paired with advertisements that pay the artists. Gabriel has put about $6 million into the project so far and he says that 1.5 million free music downloads have been given to date.

The thinking behind the advertisements is that young people are used to hearing music in advertising environments. Gabriel also touched on the idea of artists in the future releasing legal music downloads followed by physical CDs.

Reports that France will soon implement laws requiring ISPs to terminate the Internet connections of people who engage in rogue filesharing activities sent ripples through the online community. It looks like the French may have started a trend, as there are plans in the UK for a similar attack on filesharing folks.

Ministers are going after people in the UK who use filesharing services to download pirated material. The whole thing would work similarly to how it would in France, with filesharing Internet users getting three strikes before their connections are cut.

The Government will make its position clear next week, but it doesn’t look good. Six million people in the UK download files illegally every year, apparently.

There are a lot of gaps in this attack on filesharing. If you are banned by one ISP, can you sign up with another? And what if someone else uses your connection through wireless?

We can’t imagine how this approach to filesharing is going to work. People should rebel and go on strike.