Wrinkly rockers Tom Waits, Randy Newman and members of heavy metal band Heart have launched a £27m lawsuit against music website MP3.com.

They claim that it is illegally giving listeners access to their songs through the My.MP3.com service and infringing on their copyright.

The suit has been filed despite previous agreements between the website and the industry aimed at stamping out the process.

The musicians claim that classic songs such as Downtown Train by Mr Waits, Barracuda by Heart and I Love LA by Mr Newman were illegally copied from compact discs on to the internet via MP3.com users' home computers.

They believe about 270 songs are illegally available through the service and are demanding around £100,000 per song.

"Unless the major artists band together to do this, everyone else is taken advantage of as well," Henry Gradstein, lawyer for the plaintiffs said when filing the suit in Los Angeles.

Last November, MP3.com agreed to pay £37m to Universal Music Group, ending the company's disputes with leading music makers. That followed a ruling in a New York federal court that MP3.com had intentionally violated the copyrights of the music firms.

MP3.com agreed to pay the National Music Publishers' Association about £20m to make more than 1m musical compositions available on the site.

Shares in MP3.com have, over the last year, fallen from $22 to trade at less than $3 amid concern about litigation and wider issues surround the valuation of internet companies. The company is named after MP3, the a data-compression format that allows music to be downloaded from the internet.