Music industry launches download site

A trial Web site for licensing music rights has been launched by the UK Performing Rights Society (PRS) and the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS). One arm of the site - located at www.musictrial.com - will offer free downloads of CD-quality music for the next three months.

While individual consumers download their favourite music files from a public Web site, corporate licensees can submit their applications for music royalties in the privacy of a password protected forum.

Mark Isherwood, new technology director for the initiative, said: "We have not yet worked out how much to charge for royalty rates once the three month trial is up. There are also legal issues such as territoriality to consider. At the moment we are experimenting with a dummy royalty procedure."

PRS-MCPS built its own software for processing royalty applications, in partnership with Liquid Audio, which uses the Mpeg-3 audio format to deliver the music digitally.

Isherwood hopes that eventually all companies wanting copyright music will use the electronic system. "We want to show people how they can download music without infringing on copyright," he said. "There are a number of initiatives fighting pirated software, but we are the first to provide an alternative model."

Isherwood said that, as an investment, the project will ultimately make PRS more cost efficient. The alliance was funded in part by the EC Imprimatur project.

The site was due to go live at 11am this morning, but has been delayed for 24 hours by a software glitch.