Omnifone is privately owned and not a third party subscriber numbers, but accounts filed at Companies House show its revenues rose 29% to £ 4.3 million between 2009 and 2010. Nevertheless the company made a £ 15m loss, the £ 6.4 million of deferred bills contain. Its workforce has grown from 35 people four years ago to nearly 200 this year.

The company was created in 2003 by its chairman, Rob Lewis, a publishing entrepreneur and founder of successful technology news site Silicon.com. As record companies about a digital music revenue model, that the millions lost to piracy is to replace the cast, have a number of music executives took a strong interest in Omnifone.

Sony Music 's executive vice president of digital business processes among its directors is Michael Paull, and Universal Music Group' s digital business processes chef Rob Wells was a director until earlier this year.

Hughes said. "People who have a service to us, the world will we have the building blocks for other people to the models they want to want to start to build, but it can run on the same platform, so there are economies of scale. "

Omnifone services currently have fewer participants than Spotify, which is probably the largest "music rental" is a global business with an estimated 1.7 million subscribers in Europe and the United States. But there are signs that provide the online subscription model that has not been possible to make a significant contribution to the record corporate profits begin to decline.

The bulk of Spotify's 6 million followers use the service for free, but by placing tighter restrictions on the amount of free music available in May, Spotify added more than 500,000 paying customers in a month. Within months of this summer's US launch, Spotify had an estimated 175,000 subscribers.