The new website, backed by New York company SpiralFrog, hopes to make money selling advertisements that play while songs download. In addition to Universal's artists, which include Mariah Carey, Eminem, U2 and Kanye West, SpiralFrog is seeking to license the catalogs of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI Group.

"This is really promising that the labels are going to finally stop kvetching and start thinking intelligently about where their money's going to come from in the 21st century," said Aram Sinnreich, managing partner of the media and technology consulting firm Radar Research. "SpiralFrog is one small step for the record labels, one great leap for music kind."

The deal between SpiralFrog and Universal Music, the world's largest record seller, reflects how the entertainment industry is scrambling to find new ways to make money as the Internet rewrites the rules of distribution and marketing.

"If someone wants to buy a million CDs from us and then give them away on a street corner, that's fine with us as long as we get paid," said Larry Kenswil, a top digital-media executive at Universal Music.

The record company will receive an upfront payment from SpiralFrog and a portion of the company's advertising revenue. "Anything that encourages people to get music from legitimate sources is a good thing."

SpiralFrog's site is expected to debut later this year. When it does, users will be able to save downloaded tunes to a hard drive or a portable music player.

They won't be allowed to burn songs to a CD. Users also will have to visit the SpiralFrog website once a month to watch more ads. Otherwise, digital locks on the music will make it inaccessible.

SpiralFrog's 90-second download is significantly longer than the 15 to 20 seconds it takes to download a ditty from iTunes.

The company intends to target current users of illegal peer-to-peer networks who are frustrated by the poor song quality and viruses that thrive in the Internet's seedier corners.

Notably, the songs downloaded won't be formatted to play on iPods.

That could be a boon to Apple rival Microsoft Corp., which is preparing to launch its own music player, called Zune, later this year.

Already, Microsoft provides the technology that supports subscription music sites such as Yahoo Music and the recently relaunched Napster Inc.

But SpiralFrog's success is far from guaranteed.

Record labels have spent much of the seven years since the debut of Napster trying to persuade music fans not to download free songs from online file-sharing networks. They've fought the networks in court and sued thousands of individual users for copyright infringement.

And, at least for the foreseeable future, online ad revenues are unlikely to replace the $33 billion spent worldwide last year on recorded music.

Even with the success of outlets such as Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store, labels still make most of their money selling compact discs — although those sales have been declining for years.

"There's a real risk that, over time, consumers will eventually lose their willingness to pay for music at all," said entertainment analyst Mike McGuire of research firm Gartner. "You have to drive a lot of ads to a lot of eyeballs to make as much money as iTunes earns by selling songs for 99 cents each."