Another choice for fans of music

Television network Music Choice will soon give cable broadband customers access to its content and a song download service through their computers -- a move that will thrust the cable industry into the young but highly competitive online music market.

Music Choice pipes nonstop commercial-free music to cable TV and DirecTV satellite customers in about 34 million homes, nearly a third of the nation’s 107 million homes with television. Through their TVs or home theater setups, customers can listen to dozens of channels of music or tailor their own to blend, say, 20% rap, 30% jazz and 50% rock.

The network says it will be the first music TV network to extend to PCs a mirror version of its content -- which is primarily audio with the recent introduction of some video footage of artist interviews and concerts.

The broadband offering will be available for cable operators to incorporate in their websites starting today.

Cable companies refused to discuss whether they plan to deploy the service. But analysts say that’s likely, because Music Choice is a private partnership of four major cable operators -- Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox and Adelphia -- along with Sony, EMI Music, Warner Music Group, Microsoft and Motorola.

“This is a potentially powerful tool for the cable companies to fight churn,” Gartner G2 analyst Laura Behrens said, referring to the cable industry’s continuing challenge of holding customers. “The notion that you can offer this music service piece as something customers can recognize as the same thing through their TVs and broadband is appealing.”

Music Choice says about 60% of the 34 million homes with access to its music use the service, averaging about 17 hours of listening per week.

“But we’re stuck in the rooms where there are cable boxes, such as the living room or the parents’ rooms,” said David Del Beccaro, Music Choice’s president and chief executive. “Now we want to expand our reach into the rest of the house.”

With Music Choice on broadband, cable-modem customers will have free access to 52 channels of streamed music as well as the ability to download a song on demand to their PCs through Music Choice’s non-exclusive alliance with online music service Napster 2.0.

The selection of downloadable songs will be limited to Napster’s library of about 500,000 tracks. Users also will be able to buy CDs through a direct link to Amazon.com.