The UK Music trade body the BPI backed the call. Geoff Taylor, its chief executive, said: "We have tried to persuade ISPs to implement solutions that could avoid the need to take action against broadband customers who use illegal peer-to-peer filesharing.

"For more than a year, we have been negotiating with them to enforce their own terms and conditions about abuse of the account, but UK ISPs refuse to do even that on any meaningful scale. The time has come for ISPs to stop dragging their feet and start showing some responsibility, by taking reasonable steps to counter illegal music freeloading."

In France, President Sarkozy has backed the Olivennes initiative, by which ISPs will start disconnecting repeat infringers this year. This was a "brilliant precedent which other governments should follow", Mr McGuiness said.

He argued that the recent Radiohead release of a download priced on the honesty box principle had backfired. He said: "It seems that the majority of downloads were through illegal P2P download services like BitTorrent and LimeWire even though the album was available for nothing through the official band site. Notwithstanding the promotional noise, even Radiohead's honesty box principle showed that if not constrained, the customer will steal music."

In 2004, U2 signed a deal with Apple to release a branded iPod in exchange for a percentage of each device sold, but even Steve Jobs, the Apple boss, had not grasped the scale of the challenge to his own businesses, including the Walt Disney studio, presented by illegal downloading.

Mr McGuinness said: "I wish he would bring his remarkable set of skills to bear on the problems of recorded music. He's a technologist, a financial genius, a marketer and a music lover. He probably doesn't realise it, but the collapse of the old financial model for recorded music will also mean the end of the songwriter.

"We've been used to bands who wrote their own material since the Beatles, but the mechanical royalties that sustain songwriters are drying up. Labels and artists, songwriters and publishers, producers and musicians, everyone's a victim."

The manager predicted that Apple would reveal a wireless iPod that connects to an iTunes "all of the music, wherever you are" subscription service. "I would like it to succeed, if the content is fairly paid for," he said.

U2 will release a new album in October, Mr McGuinness said, which would be a collaboration with the producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. Unlike Radiohead, they are not seeking to leave their record company. Mr McGuinness said that the band had a positive relationship with Universal which would continue indefinitely.

Described as the "fifth member" of U2, Mr McGuinness negotiated a valuable deal in the late Eighties that guaranteed the group ownership of the master recordings of their albums.

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