After four years of planning, music retailer HMV plans to launch a subscription service for digital downloading of music within the next month.
HMV will initially make nearly 100,000 tracks available, ranging from almost the entire Elvis back catalogue of 990 songs to rock and pop acts such as Kylie Minogue, Dido and the Chemical Brothers.
For a monthly subscription price of £4.99, users can download 50 tracks onto a PC, and make a single digital copy onto a portable player. The tracks can be stored and played on the PC for as long as the monthly subscription is paid up, but music on portable players will be locked after one month.
Burning tracks onto a CD will cost extra, however. Each track will be individually priced, but HMV expects most to cost either 99p or £1.49.
No specific launch date has been set, but HMV expects to have the service up and running by the end of September. Users will need to have Windows Media to use the service.
Stuart Rowe, the company's e-commerce director, says the timing of the decision to sell music digitally has been critical.
"We were looking at digital downloading in 1998, so a lot of the technology has been around a long time.
"Napster was a big wake up call for everybody. Commercially the paid-for service was not viable with Napster around, but now there is a real commitment to tackle the pirates," he said.
The launch of HMV's service coincides with research from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) showing music CD sales decreased 7% in the US during the first half of the year.
The RIAA, which has been in the forefront of prosecuting illegal file sharing services such as Napster, said the numbers are a further indication that online music sharing sites are hurting the recording industry. The RIAA released a separate survey of internet users' music habits, which found that most consumers between the ages of 12 and 54 bought fewer CDs as they downloaded more tracks.
Previous studies independent of the music industry have suggested that free music on the web encourages consumers to experiment with new acts and buy more CDs.
Mr Rowe declined to estimate subscriber numbers, but said HMV believed in-store sales would "remain core to the way that people choose to buy their music for the foreseeable future".
The service is being set up in conjunction with OD2, the online music distribution company set up by Peter Gabriel in 1999.
"HMV's decision is a major milestone for the digital music," said Charles Grimsdale, the chief executive of OD2. "It's a clear signal that the industry's attitudes towards digital music have changed significantly from the days when it was seen as a threat rather than an opportunity."
