Universal Music Group tests online music

Universal Music Group is planning to fight what it considers widespread copyright violations on P2P networks by making its music library available via a paid music subscription service.

The company's partnership with the Emusic.com subscription service is different from most fledging music subscription sites in that it gives users the same ownership rights that they would have if they had bought the music on CD. Subscribers can burn the tracks to CDs or transfer them to portable MP3 audio players such as the Sonicblue Rio and Apple Computer's iPod.

This vastly increases the chance that Universal could actually compete with free file-trading networks and maintain its market share in the industry.

But Universal is only making 1,000 albums in its older, less popular catalog available online, not current top-selling artists. The company is cautiously trying to determine if such a subscription service would increase the retail sales of such music in stores, or reduce such sales.

But this approach ignores the possibility that online sales will simply supplant record store sales. The best way to determine this is to put the hottest music for sale online, not the slow-selling stuff.

Still, it's a step in the right direction for Universal. "We hope our experiment with Emusic.com will help us generate new interest in these titles, while offering a great opportunity for us to give consumers some flexibility," Larry Kenswil, Universal's eLabs president, said in a statement. "There is clearly huge demand for music delivered digitally, and we want to support as many innovative online music services as possible."

The addition of Universal music to the Emusic.com catalog brings the number of songs offered by the subscription service to about 230,000 songs, according to the company. Other online music sellers, such as Listen.com, are also trying to land licenses to distribute music from the big five record labels, including Universal, Bertelsmann's BMG Entertainment, AOL Time Warner's Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and EMI Recorded Music. Listen.com announced that it has secured licenses from all these labels, but will likely sell limited rights to the music.

Ann Harrison is a technology reporter in San Francisco. She can be reached at ah@well.com.

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