(Reuters) (11/14/03)

By Sue Zeidler

Edited By Michael Bennett

LOS ANGELES, CA - In the scramble by online music services to broaden their distribution, one leading provider on Monday announced a tie-up with a broadband Internet service while its rival announced a deal with a major consumer electronics retailer.

Broadband Internet provider Comcast Corp. on Monday said it would deliver the Rhapsody music service to its nearly 5 million high-speed Web customers via a co-branded Web site.

Privately held MusicNow online music service and retailer Best Buy, meanwhile, launched the MusicNow Download Store on the Internet and at special kiosks at Best Buy stores. The service will be based on the Windows Media standard.

Rhapsody, owned by digital media firm RealNetworks Inc, is a subscription service that enables subscribers to stream more than 400,000 songs and burn CDs for 79 cents per track.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the companies said they would give away millions of songs in November and December as part of a promotion under which Comcast customers and RealOne users would be offered 7 days of free access to Rhapsody.

Comcast customers will get an opportunity to burn 10 free songs if they subscribe during the promotion, the companies said.

After the promotion, Comcast customers may subscribe to the service for $9.95 per month. Comcast and Rhapsody also plan to launch a television and online advertising campaign.

Rhapsody on Monday also reported that subscribers streamed more than 28 million on-demand songs in October, up more than 33 percent since September.

Under the MusicNow deal, the new download store will be available exclusively through Best Buy for the month of November.

It lets music fans download songs directly to more than 40 portable digital music players, such as the Rio, iRiver and Digitalway.

The service, which also offers over 400,000 tracks from all the major record labels, will operate on Microsoft Corp's Windows Media Player 9.

That digital format stores music in a more compressed form that allows listeners to carry more songs on a digital player than would be possible with MP3, the companies said.

Both Rhapsody and privately-held MusicNow are competing in an increasingly crowded field of services aiming to make paying customers out of online fans used to getting their music for free.

Napster, the song-swap pioneer that revolutionized online music before being shut down by litigation, was relaunched in late October by Roxio Inc. iTunes, launched a Windows version in October, while other services include privately held firms such as MusicMatch and BuyMusic.com.

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