Record industry death knell of the week: a new survey of British music fans has found that 43 per cent of people interviewed continue to download music illegally, a rise from 36 per cent in 2006. We all know we'll go to hell for it by now. So why are even more of us at it?

Part of the reason is the ease with which you may find quality new music on the web - largely thanks to the rapid rise of MP3 bloggers, the web diarists who talk about and share new music for free.

The pioneering Boom Selection blog set the trend in 2003, and now bloggers uploading the record collections number well over a thousand. Many of the bigger ones, such as Stereogum, Gorilla vs Bear and Fluxblog, are sent new music daily by official publicists.

"I get sent tonnes of CDs in the mail, and I can only assume that people who are sending me music know what I'm going to do with it," says Sean Michaels, founder of Said the Gramophone, one of the longest-running sites. "But it's not explicitly said."

The bloggers' domain is an eccentric world where madcap singersongwriter Sufjan Stevens is number one every week, cult artists such as MIA, Beirut and Spank Rock are huge stars, and Girls Aloud or Rachel Stevens are appreciated for their daring electropop, not their legs.

They're mainly American indie geeks of university age, which means a certain type of too-cleverby-half US rock usually gets hyped well beyond its actual significance in the real world (note the negligible public interest in blogger favourites such as Cold War Kids and Tapes 'n Tapes).

But if you can find three or four whose tastes roughly match your own, you're set to make multiple fascinating discoveries. The major record labels still insist that the official line is "no free music as downloads", but whether they acknowledge it openly or not, the blogs have become the front line of music criticism - and the buzz they create is vital for breaking bands.

Indeed, a significant amount of the songs they make available for readers to download have been sanctioned from on high, even if the record companies don't quite admit it.

Acts such as Arcade Fire, Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen all owe much of their success to the evangelisticsharing of their early material-on blogs. It may be semi-legal, but MP3 blogging undeniably helps genuine sales in the long term. Most of the bloggers cover their sites with disclaimers urging people to buy the albums if they like the free tracks, offering links to Amazon and iTunes and usually taking songs down again after a fortnight.

Anthony Volodkin, a 21-year-old computer programmer whose extraordinary site The Hype Machine usefully collates all the blogged music online, and provides a brilliant guide to who's going to be huge in six months' time, is all too wary of comparisons to illegal software such as Kazaa and the original Napster.

"I've worked to engage the consumer," he tells me. "If it's easy enough for people to buy something, they will buy it. They're not thieves."

Does this still count as illegal downloading, or is it the musical equivalent of free cheese samples in a supermarket?

Legally grey they may be, but as long as a blind eye is turned to the bloggers, everybody benefits eventually.

The Chemical Brothers look to their future

WHO DO a band need to employ to ensure the success of their music? A good manager, certainly, as well as decent producers, publicists, video directors and roadies. But a futurist? Surely not.

It turns out the Chemical Brothers have been employing New Yorker Errol Kolosine as their resident "futurist", and it would be easy to scoff if the dance duo hadn't sent their last five albums straight to number one.

Formerly the boss of their US record label, Astralwerks, what Kolosine does is rather more useful than fortune telling with a cool title.

"Essentially I help the band to maintain a cutting edge," he tells me. "If there's a new way for people to be exposed to their music, I make sure that they have a presence."

Kolosine keeps the Brothers active on MySpace, as well as in the virtual world Second Life - and has expanded into unproven areas such as new music sharing tool iLike and on Hi5, the biggest social networking site in Central America.

He's also working on delivering music wirelessly at live shows and on "something really cool that I can't tell you about" with Microsoft's music player, the Zune. "I call it the nook and cranny approach, working in lots of smaller areas to have a cumulative effect."

The one thing he doesn't do is advise them on their music. "That's the area where they can stay cuttingedge all by themselves."

An early listen to...
Manu Chao

Often called the new Bob Marley or Joe Strummer, French-Spanish musician Manu Chao is already huge everywhere that doesn't speak English. With the 3 September release of La Radiolina, his first album in six years, he should finally conquer the rest of the globe.

The 46-year-old has recently been touring the US, despite being one of music's most outspoken critics of its government, where new songs such as the tense groove of Politik Kills demonstrated that he hasn't toned down his socially aware subject matter to win new fans.

He has turned up the guitars, however, generating an exhilarating Latin punk sound on tracks such as Rainin in Paradize, Siberia and El Hoyo.

Elsewhere, his familiar rubbery, reggae-tinged funk is still much in evidence over a generous 21 tracks. There's something for everyone - even us anglophones.