By Yinka Adegoke (Reuters) 
The future of the music business is social, free – and hopefully profitable. After a decade when sales tumbled 50 per cent, record labels cut thousands of jobs and more than 35,000 consumers got sued for illegal downloads, the industry is coming around to the idea of giving away songs as a way to get customers to pay. In September MOG and Rdio became the latest U.S. digital music start-ups to offer online streaming access to millions of songs for free, hoping that the slick user-friendly interfaces and deep libraries will convince users to become paying monthly subscribers. They follow London-based Spotify, whose 18-month-old streaming music service has taken Europe by a storm. After numerous delays, it entered the U.S. market in July. Other digital services with free access to music will emerge in coming months. Beyond Oblivion, a start-up with backing from News Corp, plans the Boinc service, which will take a different approach by enabling free access to music for users who buy special devices. The key to success for these services – and by extension the record labels – is the conversion rate to paid from free. Spotify has said it has more than 10 million registered users with 1 million now-paying subscribers, for a conversation rate of 10 per cent.