PayPlay.FM, which currently sells a nearly-1.3 million-song indie music catalog in the secure WMA format, will start selling its entire catalog in the unprotected MP3 format by the end of May, according to an email received today from PayPlay co-founder Elliot Goykhman.

These plans have been brewing since October of last year, or possibly earlier, but apparently all of the artists on the site have now signed off on the new policy: protected WMAs cost $0.77, while unprotected 192 Kbps MP3s versions of the same song cost $0.88.

The site has a really smooth interface, and the size of the indie catalog is impressive, but all that is academic unless A) they sell albums from bands you like, or B) they make it really easy to discover new (to you) bands.

PayPlay.FM makes it easier to preview albums than Amazon does, andoffers a decent discovery engine for finding bands that are similar toones you've heard of (example: similar to Mogwai). I think they could take this concept even further... maybe with something that analyzes your iTunes library a la Goombah, and feeds you stuff it knows you'll like a la Pandora.

One thing that would surely help is a centralized search tool for PayPlay.FM

and everywhere else that sells MP3s. 1.3 million songs is a lot of music, butthere's enough missing from PayPlay.FM that it could never function asmy only digital music store. Perhaps MySpace, with its centralizedartist database, could offer something like this, although they seemlargely focused on their own embeddable SnoCap stores, rather thanbecoming a hub for other digital music stores.

PayPlay.FM

(image from pre-release preview)