Maybe there are legs after all to that hypothesis on the return of pay-for content - the one Economist publisher Paul Rossi suggested at our Future Of Business Media conference last month. Just 12 percent of European web users paid for online content last year, but that’s due to rise to 19 percent by 2013, a new Jupiterresearch report says: “While free content will continue to dominate, as overall online audiences for all content categories continue to grow, so the number of European users willing to pay for content online will grow at an even greater rate.” That will mean paid content could pull in €5 billion in 2013, from €1.4 billion last year.

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That sounds like salvation for formerly premium publishers who had come out from behind their pay walls just in time for an advertising recession. But what’s driving it? A seismic shift in the number of people who will begin paying for music, Jupiter says. Though freeloaders outnumbered paying listeners by 53 million to 6.9 million last year, by 2013, it’s reckoned European efforts to drive consumers to legal downloads will see payers in the majority - 63.7 million against just 55 million.

This places a lot of faith in efforts to offer piracy alternatives. In fact, though music made up only 29 percent of all Europe’s paid content revenues last year, by 2013, a majority of paid content income (51 percent) will come from music, the forecast says.