We first heard about it last April at the front end of Napster's demise. We first saw it in action in July at the Plug.In Conference. Now, after months of anticipation, we've got our hands on some technology meant to represent the record industry's distribution model for the new digital world order. It's MusicNet, backed by EMI Recorded Music, BMG Entertainment, Warner Music Group, Zomba, and RealNetworks, and in less than 60 days consumers will get the opportunity to peruse and download hundreds of thousands of high-quality tracks both legally and securely.

Here's a preview of the technology.

In July, we reported that MusicNet would roll out a music technology platform that would go against the current grain of free music sharing and downloading. This platform, to be licensed to names as familiar as Napster and AOL, would charge consumers a premium -- somewhere between $10 to $20 per month to gain access to the entire digital music catalogs of three of the five major labels. Downloaded music would be reliable and near-CD quality, but there was an important caveat. Users could only download or stream a predetermined number of songs and then listen to them for a specific number of days. What's more, these tracks, secured with a protective invisible wrapper, could be neither copied, burned to CD, nor transferred to portable devices.

Yesterday, TechTV Labs received a preview of the MusicNet technology. Although specific details such as pricing and terms of download won't be released until the consumer service launches, we've got a pretty good picture of what's to come. The interface will be similar to that of the file-swapping applications we're already accustomed to. It has distinct columns with track name, genre, server name, speed of connection, size of file, and so on. The only addition is a column for an expiration date. The tracks we downloaded on October 8 expire on November 8.

Tabbed windows will allow users to track downloads and uploads, peruse the MusicNet homepage for genre-specific artists and tracks, type in search requests, and search the current user music library. The preview also has a conspicuous "countdown meter," which starts at 100 downloads and 100 streams. Each time you download or stream a track, the number goes down. This is certainly a different way of doing things.

Although not activated in our preview, there is a built-in peer-to-peer feature that will allow users to swap files. But there's a catch. Only those files available within the service will be shareable, so this feature sounds more like a jumpstart for community building.

The preview offers a nice cross section of artists and tracks ranging from Kraftwerk to Britney Spears. When the service launches, expect to have access to practically all the music available from these labels and more. However, it's doubtful whether MusicNet and the competing pressplay (Sony, Vivendi Universal, and EMI) will offer cross-compatibility. The downloads on our T1 connection were predictably quick and the tracks themselves, a secured version of RealAudio, were high quality.

Consumers will most likely see a variant of the MusicNet preview in many forms. AOL, Napster, and RealNetworks (with its new RealOne Player) all plan on launching their own version of the MusicNet service in the coming months. Each licensee of the platform will set its own pricing and terms but one thing is definite: Consumers who subscribe to these services should not expect to experience the free-for-all of the old Napster and its clones.