Madonna To Offer Material Online--With Restrictions

Despite an increasing number of artists allowing their music to be sold online as a la carte digital singles, not all acts are going along with the distribution concept.

Warner Bros. artist Madonna is making her major-label repertoire available to digital music services, but is restricting permanent ownership offers to those who buy an entire album; individual tracks are not available for purchase on a stand-alone basis.

What's more, Madonna is not making her music available on a rental basis. Such usage rules leave subscription services like MusicNet, Pressplay, and Rhapsody out in the cold. Those services offer their music as streams or conditional downloads, then allow subscribers to select individual tracks for burning; they do not offer albums for purchase in a bundled form.

The strategy is not in step with Warner Music Group's primary digital music stance. The major has made more than 45,000 tracks from its catalog available for a la carte purchase, with virtually no usage restrictions.
WMG declined comment on Madonna's online offerings.

Meanwhile, the Madonna camp is also looking to clamp down on peer-to-peer piracy of her new album "American Life," which is due April 22, by flooding file-sharing networks with decoy files. Those who download tracks from such services as KaZaA are greeted by the voice of Madonna asking, "What the [expletive] do you think you're doing?"