• Competition with Live Nation is going to heat up: A report says Ticketmaster and Cablevision will purchase a 49% stake in AEG Live. (Billboard.biz)

• Universal Music Group has purchased Univision's music division for an undisclosed sum. (Reuters)

• I've seen some posts that interpret this study as saying teens are not buying CDs. The study really says 52% of teens bought a CD in 2007, which is a drop from 62% the year before. A journalist can interpret this as meaning half of all teens did not buy a CD last year, but that still means half did buy a CD (slightly over half actually). There are two focal points in this news. First, teens, like everybody else, are moving away from CDs and toward downloads. No surprise there. Second, one out of two teens purchased what is still the dominant music format. (LA Times)

• Qtrax is still going to launch one of these days says the company's CEO. Lots of specifics in this post. (Listening Post)

• last.fm debuted build.last.fm, a gallery that promotes third-party applications. (Press release)

• Alec Hanley Bemis, who is both a writer and a music entrepreneur, has a sharp critique of Chris Anderson's article on the business of free. "The problem is there's a certain bit of self-servicing hypocrisy when writers at major media outlets present this kind of model. They ignore how record labels are an essential third party in the musical market and, instead, romanticize the unrepeatable, one-off efforts of street vendors and wildly famous rock stars." (LA Weekly's Play blog)