the most visible effort so far by the music biz to get into the digital music space, Pressplay launched yesterday, and it may end up being the textbook case for how not to do digital music distribution.

Remember that two years ago, Napster was proof of concept for peer-to-peer media distribution. While no royalties were paid to artists and a business model was never really tested, from the consumer acceptance side Napster was a huge success. What Napster did that was so important was shift the infrastructure burden for media distribution from the industry to the consumer.

How did the wise men of the music industry respond? They killed Napster dead, and now the kids are flocking to the harder-to-control Morpheus, and royalties are still not being paid.

Pressplay is quite a bit different than Napster. First of all, there significant limits on what can be downloaded. Music files live only as long as one remains subscribed to the service. One can burn tracks to a CD, but we're limited to at most 20 tracks a month, and no more than two of those tracks can be from the same CD. Downloads are also limited, depending on the plan, and cannot be transferred to a portable MP3 player.

Pressplay may, in fact, be designed to fail. CD sales are declining, perhaps because of the popularity of the MP3 format the music CD may be at the end of its product cycle. Perhaps the industry wants to recast digital music as more expensive and harder to use than the traditional CD.