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Pressplay, the joint venture between Vivendi Universal and Sony Music Entertainment, will launch its long-awaited and somewhat delayed online music subscription service on Wednesday.

The service will be made available to the "first several thousand consumers" through its partners Roxio, Yahoo, and Microsoft's MSN Music, Pressplay says in a statement on Tuesday. After January. 1, the service will be expanded to be offered through MP3.com and other affiliates, Pressplay says.

Pressplay will face stiff competition from Napster, yet to be re-launched as a fee-collecting service, and MusicNet, the digital music distribution company formed by AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann, EMI Group, and RealNetworks that had its debut on December 4.

Prepare to Pay

There will be four separately priced monthly subscription plans for Pressplay, ranging in price from $9.95--which includes authorization to download 30 tracks and stream 300 songs per month--to $24.95 for 100 downloads, 1000 streams, and the right to burn 20 tracks onto CD, Pressplay spokesperson Dana Harris says.

That compares to RealOne/MusicNet's monthly fee of $19.95, which covers a combination of MusicNet and RealOne's content subscription service over its new RealOne online media player. The $19.95 service includes 125 music downloads and 125 music streams per month. Users also have the option of paying $9.95 per month for RealOne and an additional $9.95 a month for MusicNet, which will include 100 downloads and 100 music streams from MusicNet.

Pressplay's service will be rolled out with a two-week free trial with 200 streams and 20 downloads. Furthermore, as an introductory offer, new users will receive the so-called Silver plan (500 streams, 50 downloads, 10 burns per month for $14.95) for the first 90 days at the basic plan price of $9.95, Harris says.

Pressplay is the music industry's latest answer to the formerly free peer-to-peer music service from Napster. And although Napster is now in the process of transforming itself, other free peer-to-peer music services such as MusicCity Networks, Gnutella, and KazaA BV continue operating, though legal cases to block the services are pending.

Better Quality?

The major music labels are hoping that the higher download quality of their music tracks, along with the sheer size and breadth of their catalogues, will convince users to pay for their online digital music. MusicNet offers a catalog of more than 75,000 songs and Pressplay will launch its service with a comparable number, according to Harris.

The two music services are fairly similar. Unlike MusicNet, however, Pressplay has teamed with Roxio to offer users the ability to burn tracks to a CD at 4X speed with a free software plug-in, Harris says. Recording at full speed, up to 24X, requires the purchase of a CD burning plug-in from Roxio, the Easy Creator Plus Plug-in for $19.95.

The RealOne Player, however, includes CD recording technology from Roxio. Using Roxio's Easy CD Creator Basic Plug-in, users can burn music and data CDs at 2X speeds. The Roxio plug-in is also available through an upgrade button on the RealOne Player.

That Pressplay is offering a CD burning option is somewhat ironic in that its parent companies--Vivendi Universal and Sony Music Entertainment--have both begun to incorporate technology into their retail music CDs that keeps consumers from playing legally purchased CDs on a PC.

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