BOLTON businessmen John Doyle and James Edge are playing key roles in a revolutionary dotcom company.

And they are expecting to capture a significant slice of the £700 million world rock and pop music publishing market. ROGER WILLIAMS hears how they plan to do it. EVEN jetlag can't blunt the enthusiasm in John Doyle's voice.

Only hours ago he stepped off a flight from Miami, but where you would expect to hear exhaustion there is only excitement.

John, 36, was brought up in Bromwich Street in the Haulgh, a world away from the palm-lined Florida coast where he has been meeting music industry executives.

"When I took this job they warned me it would involve travelling to America a lot," he said. "As if that was a bad thing!"

The chief executive officer of Songplayer has come a long way. But right now it's where the dotcom company is going that he's eager to talk about.

And well he might be. Songplayer's pioneering Internet-based music tuition system is tipped to be a smash hit with music fans, securing a slice of the multi-million pound publishing market.

For all its global aspirations, though, the venture has a distinct Bolton accent.

Business development manager James Edge was a schoolmate of John's at Thornleigh Salesian College in Astley Bridge. The 36-year-old, who used to live in Smithills Dean Road, Smithills, was head-hunted by John after a successful corporate career, latterly with oil giant Texaco.

Songplayer owns the worldwide patent on an idea which allows anyone whose computer has a CD-Rom drive to put in their favourite album and play along with on-screen instructions which come up in time with the music.

Chords, riffs and lyrics are displayed along with diagrams showing which fingers should go where on a guitar or keyboard.

If you are an Oasis fan, for instance, you can dig out your copy of (What's The Story) Morning Glory?, log on to www.songplayer.com, select a song and start playing along.

John, who describes himself as a "rank amateur" guitarist, says: "The initial impression of learning an instrument is that it takes forever before you sound anything like what you are listening to, but our stuff is about giving you a bit of instant gratification.

"OK, so you're not going to sound like Noel Gallagher straight away but if you put in an hour you're going to be playing something you recognise.

"When I first started learning the guitar in Bolton it was playing things like Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star and I realised I wasn't going to impress many girls at parties."

Impressive is definitely the word for Songplayer's ambitions.

The Gallagher brothers are among a constellation of stars to be found in its 4,000-song library. Deals with major record labels mean Manchester-based Songplayer already offers tracks by everyone from The Beatles to Coldplay and Robbie Williams. That roll call of artists could double this year as further licences are clinched.

John and James are keeping their fingers crossed that their easy to follow music playing system will capture the imagination of the Internet generation.

"It's got the potential to be huge," says John. "Nobody else has got the licences or the technology.

"The music publishing market alone was worth £700 million worldwide last year and being unique at what we do we are expecting our share of that. Five per cent would be fantastic."

By a quirk of fate, the two former Thornleigh pupils' company has entered into discussions with XL Recordings about adding the music of another of the school's ex-pupils made good, Badly Drawn Boy, to Songplayer's growing library.

They will score another coup on April 9 when the new album by Welsh stadium rockers The Stereophonics, Just Enough Education To Perform, becomes the first CD to feature a direct link to their site.

It will include Mr Writer, the first single taken from the disc, in an innovation which could have enormous future spin-off benefits.

But Mr Doyle stresses that unlike many here today, dotgone tomorrow cyberbusinesses, Songplayer has not hurled a lavish advertising budget at promoting its 21st Century idea.

Instead it is relying on music fans for that most timeless of concepts, word of mouth, to achieve a slow building success.

Already there are almost 20,000 registered users paying to download files - typically these cost £5 for three songs - and the company is moving towards a profit, something even Internet giants such as holiday firm LastMinute.Com have yet to achieve.

John and James have their eyes fixed firmly on the American market as their next target.

Somehow you get the feeling both men will be taking a few more flights.