Will they listen?

IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE a consumer-goods company refusing to sell the most popular version of its product, but that’s just what the world’s largest record companies have been doing. While consumers and independent artists made the MP3 format the lingua franca of the Digital Age, the major music labels offered downloadable songs only in formats that were scrambled to deter copying.

At least until this year. EMI, the world’s third-largest record company, started making its songs available as MP3s in April. Apple’s market-dominating iTunes music store is expected to offer those tracks soon alongside the cheaper, scrambled versions of the songs. And this week, Amazon.com upped the stakes by announcing plans to sell downloadable music in the MP3 format only. Expected to launch later this year, Amazon’s music venture will give labels and artists an all-or-nothing choice: If they don’t make their songs available as MP3s, their music won’t be for sale.

The announcement reverberated through the music industry because of Amazon’s market power -- nearly $11 billion in sales last year. Offering MP3s helps consumers by ensuring that the songs they buy at Amazon will work easily with whatever portable music player and digital audio equipment they own. One of the biggest complaints about scrambled formats is that there are at least three kinds, and each brand of portable player is compatible with only one.

Still, the other major labels -- Universal Music Group, Sony BMG and Warner Music Group -- are reluctant to give up on scrambling (also known as digital rights management, or DRM). They hope consumers will buy new audio-visual equipment that can zip files around a home network while preventing them from being shared online. They’re also eager to replace unscrambled CDs with scrambled downloads, not MP3s. Those visions are sustained by a belief that technology can stop piracy. But that seems quixotic, given how little effect it’s had so far on file sharing.

Amazon and Apple are giving record companies a testing ground that begs to be used, either to experiment with premium pricing or to see if the format change boosts sales. While they’re making up their minds, recording industry executives can shop for DVDs, books and electronics at Amazon and see how persuasively the site prods them to buy songs ... from artists not on their labels.