Blighty telco BT has a cunning plan to stop people from clogging its tunes with Music file sharing by offering its own download service.

According to a leaked tender document, the cunning plan is to give punters an alternative to file sharing by offering them bandwidth on a service which is designed to take the load. This will free up BT's tubes for those who want to use it for net surfing.

Apparently everything is set up and talks ongoing between the BT and Big Content. Names suggested include Universal and EMI.

The launch date has not been confirmed, but it seems that when it goes online the service will offer BT's 5.5 million customers completely free music downloads for an initial period of 6-9 months. Once they are hooked, there will be a monthly subscription fee.

It is hard to see how BT could offer a service that could compete with the likes of Spotify, and it is a moot point how much bandwidth could be saved if the service is just dealing with the comparatively short music files. However it does explain why BT is starting to block some of the P2P sites such as Pirate Bay. It means that they have a service that can take up the slack and get a healthy profit from stopping access to pirate sites.