MySpace starts singing for its supper

In a bid to spruce up its popular online hangout, MySpace plans to flip the switch Thursday on a much-anticipated service that will give its roughly 120 million users free access to hundreds of thousands of songs from the world's largest recording labels.

The catch: the music can be played only on personal computers connected to the Internet and listeners have to tolerate advertising splashed across the screen. Anyone who wants to transfer a song to a portable device like Apple's iPod will have to buy the music through Amazon.com's year-old downloading service, which sells songs for as little as 79 cents apiece.

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