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Pressplay, the forthcoming online music service backed by Vivendi Universal and Sony Music Entertainment, will allow its customers to burn selected digital songs to a CD, the company says.

Subscribers will be able to burn tracks to a CD at 4X speed with a free software plug-in. Recording at full speed, up to 24X, requires the purchase of a premium CD burning plug-in from Pressplay partner Roxio, the companies say in a joint statement. Pricing was not disclosed.

Pressplay expects to launch in the United States before the end of the year, with about 100,000 music tracks online. It was originally scheduled to go live in September.

However, not all Pressplay tracks will be available for burning to CD, according to a Roxio spokesperson. "There will be songs that are available for streaming only and some for burning," he said.

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The burn option is not offered by competitor MusicNet. Roxio does provide a CD burn plug-in for the player MusicNet uses, RealNetworks's RealOne Player software, which can be used to burn content found elsewhere.

MusicNet was launched last week by RealNetworks and backed by AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and EMI Group. The MusicNet service is also now in beta-test on AOL, available to subscribers of that service.

The issue of whether consumers have the right to copy or move digital music across devices continues to heat up. Some music labels are experimenting with technological restrictions so you can't play an audio CD on your PC, for example. The newly-launched RealOne also prevents you from moving digital tunes so you can play them on a different device than the one where you downloaded them--preventing you from moving them from your PC to your portable MP3 player, for example.

Services Proliferate

Pressplay will be offered through affiliates, including Microsoft's MSN, Yahoo, and Universal's MP3.com. The subscription site will use Microsoft's WMA format at launch.

The service will offer content from its backers as well as from EMI and several independent record labels.

Pressplay was organized as Vivendi's and Sony's corporate answer to the formerly free peer-to-peer music service from Napster. However, the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating both Pressplay and MusicNet for possible antitrust violations.

Competition in the online music service is heating up with the arrival of corporate rivals. Among them is a fee-collecting Napster, soon to be relaunched.

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