Napster, the online music service which was forced to shut down after legal action by the record industry, relaunched in the UK yesterday.

The original Napster web site allowed users to locate the music files they wanted and download them to their computer for free.

The new web site - napster.co.uk - went live with a catalogue of 500,000 tracks.

For a subscripton of £9.95 a month, users can copy individual songs to a CD or transfer them to a portable device for 99p or from £9.95 for an album.

Friday May 21, 2004