MP3.com starts e-mail music promotion service

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) -- Online music service MP3.com Inc. said on Thursday it would start a promotion service that sends selected digital music via e-mail to targeted listeners.

Its first promotion will be for the band Vast, who is on the Elektra label, which is a unit of Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Music Group. Time Warner is the parent company of CNN.com.

E-mail in the service, dubbed singleserving, will be targeted geographically and demographically. It will include a digital version of the song plus links to either the artist's or the label's Web sites, as well as a link to buy the song through a retailer selected by the label.

The San Diego-based company's deal with Elektra comes against the backdrop of a copyright infringement suit won by the five major labels against MP3.com stemming from its compilation of a database of over 80,000 albums, which when combined with its software, allows users to store music digitally and then access it via any computer.

Four of the five labels, including the Warner Music Group, have settled the suit. But the largest of the labels, Seagram Co.'s Universal Music Group, is still engaged in a court battle to claim more severe damages.

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