The vast majority of insurance providers are failing to offer digital contents cover simply because it is such a new market, an industry expert has said.

Graeme Trudgill, technical services manager at the British Insurance Broker's Association (BIBA), was speaking in the wake of a recent report from Computing Which? magazine - which revealed that fewer than half of insurance companies offer cover for loss or damage to music and media downloads.

"More and more people, young people in particular, are buying downloads and other things and it's not something that insurance, over its many hundreds of years, had had to think about," Mr Tudgill explained.

"Some insurance companies have accommodated this but many of the others are looking at it and thinking: 'How can they measure a loss?," he went on.

"It is a new exposure and so really at the moment, yes you can get it, there are a few specialists out there who can offer it, but it's quite likely that a lot of the standard insurance policies out there don't offer it because it's just too new."

The Computer Which? survey claimed that many insurers seem confused about policies relating to downloads.