In a bid to thwart music piracy over the Internet, music industry executives have announced plans to create technology that would provide labels and artists with greater copyright control over music on the World Wide Web.

The effort is the industry's response to computer users who are downloading CD-quality songs on thousands of websites that illicitly store digital music. Most of the sites use a format called MP3, which enables Internet users to send and receive songs by computer without spending a penny.

With the Secure Digital Music Initiative, as the collaboration has been dubbed, industry officials hope to develop an answer to MP3 that allows them to collect royalties. In addition, industry officials believe that once the music business unites behind a digital format for Internet music, technology companies will be spurred to market new products that can store and play songs from the Web.

Executives at Sony Entertainment Group, EMI Recorded Music, Universal Music Group and other major labels were on hand at a news conference in Manhattan to announce the initiative. They offered few details about their plans. The largest unanswered question: Will compact discs one day be encoded so that buyers cannot upload them onto websites?