The format offers little in the way of piracy protections, however, and Lee Black, an analyst for Webnoize, says the major music labels have been unwilling to support it because "they're afraid of loss of control."
Leslie Grandy, who manages RealNetworks' consumer division, says consumers who portable digital music will have to wait for manufacturers to catch up to copyright protections.
"Most of the current MP3 players are not secure devices," Grandy said.
"Consumer expectations have been set on months of working with downloadable music that was not rights controlled."
Such demands for control prompted the Justice Department to investigate whether MusicNet and Pressplay will stifle competition among smaller companies.
Both companies have been subpoenaed for documents detailing their business plans and licensing arrangements.
Even once the services launch, there's no guarantee consumers will bite.
The Chicago music aficionado, DeLeon, has been sharing MP3s online using a program called WinMX since Napster went offline in July.
She said it would take an added incentive, like the ability to burn legitimate downloaded music to blank CDs, to get her to use one of the new services.
DeLeon is not alone. A Webnoize survey of college students this year found 84 percent favored the easy-to-use MP3 format over other file types, Black said.
Though the Windows Media Audio format is technically superior to MP3 in its smaller footprint and higher quality, Black said, it's "very protected and has lots of rules around it."
"Security," said Black, "flies in the face of usability."
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