• MySpace Music will launch in September. "The new offering will enable MySpace members to listen to free streaming music as well as purchase song downloads, ringtones, T-shirts and concert tickets," CEO Chris DeWolfe told a conference yesterday. (Fortune)

• The untitled album by rapper Nas tops the album chart this week with sales of 187,000. Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III dropped 15% to 105,000 units. Sales for the week were down 7.9% versus last lear. (Billboard.biz)

• Yahoo Music notified its customers that after September 30th, the final day of its music store, it will stop supporting the DRM tracks they purchased at the store. "...you will not be able to transfer songs to unauthorized computers or re-license these songs after changing operating systems." (Bit Player)

• Here's a really good profile of MP3 aggregator Hype Machine that acts as a primer for the problems faced by many progressive music sites. "There's only one problem: The Hype Machine is still operating in a gray area legally." (Fortune)

• A convention center is being planned for Irving Texas that will have a 6,000-seat concert hall. Live Nation will operate the venue. (Dallas News)

• There's a report, denied by Live Nation, that the San Diego House of Blues may be in danger of closing. (San Diego Reader)

• AOL Music has launched Tour Tracker, a free service that lets users track tours. It's missing so many venues for Nashville that I'll stick to the free local weekly newspapers. (Press release)

• The art and importance of sequencing an album. (The Guardian)

Wow. The Times Online posted an article today that says the Rolling Stones will leave EMI and sign with Universal Music Group. No indication was given that EMI's new ownership or organizational structure was a reason for the departure. Instead, the article mentioned a "bidding war" and the Stones' desire to "court rivals in pursuit of a higher price."

This is a huge blow to EMI. It will miss out on both new releases and catalog since the Stones will take their post-ABKCO recordings to Universal.

Universal Music Group parent company Vivendi released its Q2 results today. (PDF of earnings release) First half evenues of €2,044 million were 4.9% improvement at constant currency and a 2.4% decline in actual currency. Digital revenues were up 33%, the same year-over-year improvement achieved in Q1. The company claimed growth in music publishing, merchandising and license income but offered no supporting numbers.

Q2 revenues were €1,011 million, a 3% gain at constant currency and a 5.3% decline in actual currency.

Not great but not bad all things considered. Revenue is only part of the story. Improved digital margins may be helping the overall but we weren't given any information. Unlike most Vivendi earnings releases, this one was void of anything but gross revenue numbers. No EBITA or operating profit numbers were given for any of its divisions.

There's a good deal of news today about the British plan announced today that will see labels work with ISPs to curb piracy. The Independent reported that British ministers are backing proposals to tax ISP subscribers for music sharing. After reading up on the matter, I think The Independent jumped the gun (which led to a misled eruption across the Internet) and included a tax when the Memorandum of Understanding does not contain such a proposal. Billboard.biz has a good article on the anti-piracy plan and doesn't mention a tax. Here's the BPI press release and the IFPI press release.

The Guardian has a transcript of a call with the BPI that has a very good explanation of the plan. In it, BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor said the report of a tax was incorrect. "A widely-applied tax probably isn't the way forward here" and the idea "hasn't ever been tabled," he told reporters on the call.

What the BPI outlined was a five-point plan to educate and warn ISP customers as well as develop "innovative new music services" (the Sky-Universal service was singled out as an example).

Here's how this will shake out. First, ISPs adopt a code of self-regulation to prevent the government from doing it for them. Second, labels will continue with their education campaign to prop up the value of music. Third, ISPs will send out thousands of letters every week to suspected infringers. Fourth, steps will be taken to deal with repeat infringers (note that Britain does not want to take after France's "three strikes" proposal). Fifth, customers will be pointed to legal alternatives, which could be a new generation of music service formed in partnerships between labels and ISPs.

And what will happen If and when steps one through five fail to reach the desired outcome? That's probably when the reported tax comes in. I imagine the parties involved would like to keep the tax as a last ditch effort and let the five-point plan have its chance. In the end, they could end up pushing for a tax. I place little faith in a broader education campaign and a bit more in labels' and ISPs' ability to create viable, legal alternatives. Labels could be content if ISP-based music services ease piracy's sting and if ISPs can adequately convert infringers to their legal, paid services. Then again, I think labels will always have fits knowing that any piracy exists. Digital piracy isn't going away unless its taxed out of existence, so a tax will always be seen by some as a viable tool.

(By the way, the memorandum was signed by the Motion Picture Association as well as the major labels. Labels wouldn't be the only parties after that tax revenue.)

As for the revenue that could be gained if there was a tax, it could plug some holes. The Independent puts the number of broadband subscribers engaged in music piracy at 6.5 million. At a £30 annual tax, that's £195 million in revenue per year. Something in the range of £200 million would get UK recorded music revenues back to its 2003 level of £1.23 billion.

eMusic has added some new features and I spent the morning browsing around and trying them out. In a nutshell, the new features both push and pull. They pull in content from around the web (YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia). They push out links to eMusic using social networking, blogging and recommendation sites. All new features can be found only on unique album pages, not on artist pages or new release sections of the site.

Below the track listing there is a box called "Discover" with features written by the eMusic editorial staff for the site's magazine. (Examples are "The Best Hard Rock and Metal on eMusic" and "More Alt-Punk Essentials." Each feature has its own icon with a graphic and a sample of the opening paragraph. The old layout had only text links to the features.

The "Dig deeper on the net" section of an album page pulls additional content from YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia. Also on each album page is a tool bar that has, among other functions, a "post to web" menu with links to Facebook, digg, Twitter, Technorati and about a dozen others.

The content from the web adds to the pages of some artists. Obviously the more popular the artist the more content will be available. I looked at the page for an album by The Hold Steady and watched some promotional videos and a video of the band performing on "Letterman."

For the artists with common names (the ones you have a hard time finding through a search engine) the YouTube section can have more misses than hits. On the page for October Language by the band Belong there are videos for Linkin Park's "Somewhere I Belong," Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together" and Pat Benetar's "We Belong," among others. Nomo's Ghost Rock page had Pastor Troy's "No Mo Play in GA" below a video by Nomo. And for albums like Salimata by Senegal's Tidiane Gaye, there is no content to pull from the Internet. Since eMusic has a great deal of unknown, slow-moving content from around the world, the number of blank "dig deeper" sections will be many.

eMusic wrote about the new features at the site's 17dots blog yesterday. Here's the post. Readers have left some comments on the new design and features. One complaint is the new layout's width. I agree on that one.

Overall, the additions make for an improved experience. For me, eMusic's draw is the content, price and ability to find new music that will interest me. The new features impact only the last of those three. For previewing music (via YouTube videos) and educating yourself before making a purchase, the new features are nice. eMusic's competitors should take notice.

• FCC Commissioner Michael Copps has voted against approving the XM-Sirius merger. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and Commissioner Robert McDowell. Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein has said he will vote for the merger if stricter conditions are met. Commissioner Deborah Tate has not issued a statement yet. (Radio Ink)

• Bobby Valentino, who was recently dropped by Disturbing Tha Peace/Def Jam, will take his own imprint, Blu Kolla Dreams, to EMI. (Baller Status)

• Joe Carvello, former TVT SVP of promotion, has launched Upstream Music Group. The label, to be distributed by Asylum Records, will provide for other labels in-house marketing, promotion and publicity services. (Billboard.biz)

• Morninglory Music in Santa Barbara is closing its final store. The Isla Vista location, located next to UC Santa Barbara, closed six years ago after being open for 38 years, and the Lompoc store shut down in December. (The Daily Sound)

• U2 fans are feeling some anxiety over the band's deal with Live Nation and whether or not Live Nation's ticketing system will be up to snuff next year. "While it is still too early for any speculation, fans are already showing concern in many online forums about how ticketing will go, hoping that what happened in 2005 will not happen again." (@U2)

Yesterday eMarketer released a report with mobile music revenue forecasts through 2012. The title, "Mobile Music Searches for Hit Formula," says it all because the winning formula has thus been very elusive.

Global mobile music spending, predicts eMarketer, will total $3.3 billion in 2008 and to $4.5 billion in 2009. The figures exclude monophonic and polyphonic ring tones and include major markets such as the U.S., Japan, China, UK, Spain, Germany and South Korea (but excludes many significant markets like Australia, Russia and Brazil).

eMarketer predicts ad-supported mobile music to grow at a smokin' compounded annual growth rate of 53.4% through 2012. "Marketers will account for a greater proportion of that overall spending as the ad-supported model for mobile music gathers steam," said John du Pre Gauntt, the analyst who wrote the report.

According to M:Metrics, only 5.7% of mobile phone users in the U.S. listened to music on their mobile phones in November 2007. The majority of music on the mobile phone was sideloaded from a PC. In January 2008, says M:Metrics, the percentage of U.S. mobile phone owners that used the device to listen to music was 6.7%. But 28% of smartphone owners used their devices for music, and 74.1% of iPhone users used the device to listen to music.

If current U.S. trends are any indication, mobile subscriptions will struggle to remain relevant and sideloading will be the prime source of songs on mobile devices. The current generation of services don't look like they're going to move the needle any time soon. The most popular mobile music apps will be free services like Pandora and last.fm on Internet-ready devices (they're off to a great start at the iTunes app store). Nokia's Comes With Music is a wild card and will test the degree to which people can base their digital music acquisition on a mobile device (as opposed to the PC). It's most likely that a Nokia service will be a complement to, not a substitute for, existing music acquisition and listening for the next handful of years.

In its Recording Industry In Numbers 2008 report, the IFPI put the 2008 global digital market at $2.9 billion (in trade dollars, not total consumer spending).

To talk about digital and mobile music in terms of a global market, though, misses the differences between markets. (The eMarketer report breaks down global revenues by markets. The free preview does not show the separate charts.) The thing to understand is markets differ radically when it comes to mobile patterns. In the US, ring tones and mobile downloads account for under 10% of total digital trade revenue. In Canada they total about 12%. In Japan, mobile single tracks account for 45% of trade revenue from digital music, and ring tones (both master ring tones and ringback tones) account for 42%. In South Korea, streams represent 25% of trade revenues from digital music, subscriptions 13% and mobile single tracks only 3%.

Universal Music Group (UK and Ireland) and British Sky Broadcasting, the satellite television operator that also offers broadband Internet access, will launch by the end of the year an unnamed venture that will offer music subscriptions to Sky customers. The subscription plans will offer unlimited streaming as well as a fixed number of monthly MP3 downloads (the number of download will vary with different packages). No specifics on pricing, a launch date or other label participants were made available.

Said Jupiter's Mark Mulligan, "Sky is trying to be the first music service targeted at families. They have relationships with households, while offerings such as Apple have been more about young, tech-savvy one-to-one relationships." In his blog he said about subscription levels, "It doesn’t appear (yet) that one of those tiers will be a unlimited or near-unlimited MP3 tier."

Much of the press I've read calls this an iTunes killer, or that Universal and Sky are taking on iTunes. Par for the course. Every new music store or service is tagged as an iTunes challenger. The problem here is that iTunes has too much going for it: selection, familiarity, brand awareness, integration with the iPod. For many people, it is the sole place from which they experience digital music. That may not change. But there is a huge swath of consumers to capture that iTunes will not.

Mulligan and Jupiter's David Card are lumping in this subscription plan with the music subscription services that some at Jupiter have long predicted would be far more popular than they have been. (In 2005 they were predicting $1.2 billion in subscriptions by 2010. It will probably not crack $300 million unless Nokia hits the mobile subscription sweet spot. And much of that revenue is for unlimited streaming, not for "to go" plans.) But there are big differences between the Sky/Universal subscription and the likes of Napster, Rhapsody and Zune -- none of which can get traction outside of a small group of music enthusiasts.

First and most importantly, the subscription plan will offer MP3 files. The idea of renting music has not appealed to consumers. Ownership is more appealing. Rhapsody is not in the same category as eMusic, which sells subscriptions to MP3 download packages of varying sizes. eMusic is not hampered by DRM, its files can be played on any portable device and the files are owned in perpetuity. Again, renting music is not a concept that has not gained widespread acceptance. As Ian Rogers said, "Inconvenient experiences don’t have Web-scale potential."

Second, the service and billing will be bundled with other Sky services. No separate account or credit card expense.

The service will need additional labels -- like all of them -- to reach its potential. And there is potential here, absolutely. Given the degree to which labels and ISPs are working together (and are occasionally nudged toward the negotiating table by the government), the UK strikes me as a good market to launch this sort of product.