Wal-Mart, says a report at Engadget, has reversed its earlier decision to cut its DRM servers and thereby rendering useless tracks with Microsoft DRM purchased at the store.

"What this means to you is that our existing service continues and there is no action required on your part," Wal-Mart told customers in an email sent to music buyers. "Our customer service team will continue to assist with DRM issues for protected windows media audio (WMA) files purchased from Walmart.com."

• CEO/chariman Doug Morris has re-signed with Universal Music Group. (Billboard.biz)

• An interview with Doug Morris. Read the entire thing. Here's a taste: "What I take seriously is the fact that we're people who create art. Whether you like our art or not, it's what we do. My whole point of view is this problem we're in, which is caused by technology, will be solved by technology. Some genius on the other side will figure out how to stop the piracy that seems very logical to me. So all these people who come up with these opinions that they should have done this and that, it's all ridiculous." (Billboard.biz)

• Sony plans to get Sony Music in sync with the rest of the company. "Sony already this month has moved to streamline the music group, merging two labels that had been run separately by Bertelsmann and Sony. Next, the Sony executive said, will be a push to better integrate Sony music with Sony Ericsson mobile phones, which had a paltry 8 percent market share in the second quarter." (AP)

• Universal Music Group's Fontana International label group has partnered with UK-based Cooperative Music. Fontana will help develop Coop Music titles in the North America. (Press release)

• Lil Jon has singed up with Universal Republic as an artist, owner of new record imprint, producer and A&R consultant. (Press release)

In recent weeks I have noticed Girl Talk's Feed the Animals at a number of download stores. His albums may or may not violate copyright law, depending on who you ask, and availability has been an issue. I don't recall seeing such good sales from an album with such dubious legal standing. Normally albums in dispute are either low-grade recordings or too far out of the public eye to merit attention. Are retailers loosening up?

It was an issue of distribution, the label told me today, and not an issue with retail. iTunes has been the one online retailer that has refused to carry Girl Talk releases. Now, Illegal Art is working with different distributors and has better availability on online retail. (According to the album pages at eMusic, Illegal Art is using TuneCore for Girl Talk's last two releases.) Physical distribution is a different matter. His CD lost distribution in July, the same time, according to the NY Times, iTunes stopped carrying his album Night Rippers.

Feed the Animals, an album of questionable legality due to its uncleared samples, is being sold at Amazon.com MP3 (currently ranked #58 ), eMusic (the #15 album this week), Napster and Lala.com (currently ranked #89, though that is a measure of total plays, not just purchases). Rhapsody carried three Girl Talk releases but not Feed the Animals.

The album debuted at the Illegal Art website as a pay-what-you-want download. It is still available -- for free if you desire to pay nothing -- at the label's site while it sells well elsewhere.

Why the gray area? Sampling another song without clearance is normally grounds for a lawsuit (if the song makes it through a label's safety net). In the case of Feed the Animals, the number of potential plaintiffs is huge. But each sample is brief. Few run over 30 seconds, and many last just a second or two. (To see which samples are used in the songs, follow along at the album's Wikipedia page.) Label and artist insist the album is protected by the fair use doctrine. Many experts have said it would fail in court. While it may be technically illegal, any label or publisher that takes the label to court risks an unfavorable outcome and, thus, a game-changing precedent. In addition, Illegal Art and Girl Talk are not exactly asset-rich legal targets.

The label admits to keeping a low profile in spite of the considerable press attention. "We're not even pushing it as hard as we might," Illegal Art founder Philo T. Farnsworth told the Pittsburgh City Paper.

Atlantic rapper T.I. has passed two million MySpace friends, his MySpace page has over 82.6 million views and his hit single "Whatever You Like" has over 27 million streams at MySpace. Right now all of the songs at his MySpace page are collectively getting well over one million streams per day and to date have streamed over 138 million times.

How does all that translate into cash?

First-week sales of the album Paper Trail were 568,000. The album will have a big second-week drop but should top one million units within a few weeks. First week sales of the song "Whatever You Like" totaled almost 335,000 units. That's 0.13 song purchases per MySpace stream, or $0.09 of download revenue per song stream. (I'm comparing U.S. sales to global MySpace statistics. Comparing numbers across territories like that isn't the best way to compare artist statistics, but it's the only way I can do it.)

Having a #1 song will influence traffic at an artist's MySpace page. At a penny per stream, T.I.'s MySpace page can bring in $15,000 per day if visitors listen to 1.5 million streams (which T.I. will easily exceed today). Those streams would generate even more revenue if the songs had an Amazon.com buy button (which they do not yet have). That's $105,000 in ad revenue for one week. Album sales, assuming a 15/85 digital/physical split, brought in (roughly) $5.42 million. First-week sales of "Whatever You Like" brought in $235,000 (I don't know a la carte sales from other tracks on the album, so I am ignoring them as well as ringtones). The total of the three is $5.76 million. That's $3.75 per MySpace friend (again, not including ringtones).

Robin Thicke released an album last week as well. Something Else sold 137,000 units. His MySpace page has 8.52 million visits to date and he has 279,000 friends. Even though Thicke's MySpace page has streamed 17 million songs, he doesn't currently have a #1 single as does T.I. Thicke's MySpace page has streamed his latest single only 130,000 times. The page is getting about 30,000 streams per day. That's only $300 per day at a penny per stream and $2,100 per week. Just to get in revenue from a single, let's say Thicke sold 50,000 units last week. That's $35,000 in revenue. With a 15/85 split on the album, that's revenue of $1.31 million. The total for the three is about $1.35 million. That's $4.82 per MySpace friend.

Let's compare to another debut last week, The Glass Passenger by emo band Jack's Mannequin. The album debuted with sales of 49,000 units. Relative to the band's number of MySpace friends, that's the same as T.I. but worse than Thicke. If friends of Jack's Mannequin had purchased the album at the same rate Robin Thicke friends bought his record, they would have sold about 104,000 units. The band's MySpace page had streamed over 14 million songs to date and is currently doing less than 100,000 streams per day. That's $1,000 per day at a penny per stream. With a 20/80 split on the album (a bit higher because it's rock) that's first-week revenue of about $467,600 without taking into account a la carte track purchases and ringtones. That's only $2.21 per MySpace friend.

• T.I.: 0.263 albums per MySpace friend, 0.026 MySpace friends/profile views
• Thicke: 0.491 albums per MySpace friend, 0.0327 MySpace friends/profile views
• Jack's Mannequin: 0.23 albums per MySpace friend

• UK retailer Carphone Warehouse will put together a bundle of products that should help spur interest in Nokia's Comes With Music service. "Carphone is putting its backing behind Nokia’s debut Comes With Music handset, the 5310, bundling a free laptop and 3’s mobile broadband with it." (Mobile Today)

• Does Los Angeles have too many venues? "By the end of the year, Los Angeles will have seven venues booking acts that draw between 800 and 2,300 and two halls." (Variety)

• George Jones and other country stars will have celebrity-themed venues at the Country Crossings entertainment resort being built in Dothan, Alabama. The complex will include a 15,000-seat amphitheater, several major hotels and an RV park. (Music Row)

• Play.com now offers MP3s from all four majors. (Telegraph)

• In yesterday's post about EMI's "digital sandbox" I erred in writing about MusicNet as a direct-to-consumer business. EMI was one of the founders of MusicNet, but the direct-to-consumer service with major label ownership was PressPlay. Dumb mistake on my part. MusicNet and PressPlay were very different. Rather than strike out the incorrect sentences in the post I just deleted them and opted for a correction in this space.

Ipsos’ TEMPO Digital Music Brandscape study shows improvements in brands have been made by iTunes, Rhapsody and Amazon.com while Napster, MySpace, Wal-Mart and Yahoo have experienced brand erosion over the last year (press release).

A survey of 1,148 Internet users in the summer of 2008 revealed 58% of people believe iTunes is the top fee-based digital music service or download store. That is an increase from 51% last year. Rhapsody improved to 7% from 4% while Amazon.com got 9% of votes (it did not sell MP3s in the summer of 2007). (Here's the PDF with the numbers.)

Napster got 8% (down from 10%), MySpace got 4% (down from 5%), Wal-Mart got 4% (down from 6%) and Yahoo got 2% (down from 4%). Other stores/services got 9% (down from 20%).

In terms of brand awareness (here's that PDF), iTunes 39% unaided awareness was far ahead from the next best service, Napster with 13% unaided awareness. Awareness figures came from a sample of 1,249 U.S. downloaders.

The statistics offer evidence of some services' success and show the difficulties faced by the less well known brands. eMusic is a good case in point. While eMusic is one of the more successful download services, it is not well known outside a core group of users. Few people surveyed think it is the best service and is ranks low in unaided (2%) and aided (20%) awareness. Similarly, a new service like last.fm is hailed as an innovative trailblazer but faces incredibly low unaided (0%) and aided (6%) awareness. The company, purchased by CBS for $280 million, must be mainstream to be considered a success. It has a long way to go.

One thing that stands out is the amount of services/stores that were considered to be the best. This year the "others" category was 9%, a big drop from 20% last year. The implication? The competitive music service/store market is increasingly marked by clear winners and losers. Mainstream users may not have room for more than a handful of services and the competition for the top few spots on the ladder should increase in the coming years. At the same time, the competition will act as a weeding out process. I can't imagine some of today's services being around in three years.

• After the city council voted 7-2 in favor of zoning changes that will allow Live Nation to move ahead with its plans for a new Fillmore venue in Silver Spring, MD. It's a sweet deal for Live Nation. The the council and the Maryland legislature will spend $8 million to build the venue and Live Nation will rent the venue from the county. (WashBiz Blog)

• Mufin is yet another music recommendation engine. (VentureBeat)

• Believe Digital has acquired digital distributor mTunes. (Billboard.biz)

• Sony BMG has made the new Oasis album the first advertiser for AOL's new Platform-A network. (New Media Age)

• An interview with LP33.tv's content director, Vlad Lodzinski. LP33.tv, a music discovery/video portal that features independent acts, launched today. (The Guardian)

The Financial Times reported today that EMI is working on its own portal through which it can sell music and video content directly to consumers. Some aspects of the site will be free. The launch is expected before Christmas.

Many people are probably joining me in wondering what EMI knows that nobody else knows. Consumers prefer to shop at digital stores with broad catalogs. This is the age of the Wal-Mart superstore, not the corner grocery store. "I am not quite sure what EMI will get for the money they have spent on it," one executive told the Financial Times.

This is all just speculation at this point, but the site could go a few different ways. It could be a place to launch new artists. It could have exclusive content that would give consumers a reason to visit. Or it could be positioned as an alternative to existing stores. The latter model assumes consumers are indifferent about where they stream and purchase music -- they're not -- and would put EMI in a role record labels have historically not played very well.

Update: Alley Insider's Peter Kafka says the plan is not for a portal but for a "digital sandbox" or "laboratory," according to his sources. Billboard.biz's source said it will be a "consumer lab." By considering it -- at least publicly -- more a learning experience than a full-fledged store, EMI is obviously downplaying the goal of the initiative. Maybe they'll learn something new about consumers, or maybe they'll collect a lot of email addresses, but I agree with Kafka that this is an odd time for tinkering. My gut tells me EMI, like so many others, is hell bent on finding a way to keep the 30% it gives retailers like iTunes and hopes a digital sandbox will reveal the answer.