• Country label 903 Music has "ran out of money" and shut its doors. (MusicRow.com)

• The Arctic Monkey's UK chart domination looks like it could have been made possible by an error by iTunes. The store accidentally put up for sale the individual tracks for the band's new album, Favourite Worst Nightmare, before the album itself was available. Fans acquired the album by simply downloading each track. The result was 17 tracks in the UK Top 200 singles chart. (NME.com)

• Flat-fee digital distributor TuneCore announced a strategic partnership with music retailer Guitar Center -- which is a TuneCore investor -- that will promote TuneCore to Guitar Center customers. (Press release)

• Keith Wozencroft, currently president of Capitol Music and Virgin Records UK, has entered into a partnership with EMI that will see him launch a joint-venture label with EMI UK and Ireland. (Billboard.biz)

• The NARM website has a PowerPoint presentation from Nielsen SoundScan that was given at the recent 2007 NARM conference. The slide show has a good amount of information on album and digital track sales for both 2006 and year-to-date 2007. Slide 17 had a statistic I had not seen: In 2006, there were 75,774 new albums released, up from 60,313 the year before. Another good tidbit: In 2006, there were 50% more digital-only albums released than the year prior -- but 95% of those digital albums sold fewer than 100 units each. Slide 47 has some info on ringtone sales, which Nielsen began tracking in September 2006.

• There's a rumor that Atlantic will split with Vice Records and decide which artists it wants to keep. (Hits)