VentureBeat

SanDisk and the record companies are launching a new music format today dubbed slotMusic. The company hopes music companies will publish entire albums on SanDisk flash memory cards that are smaller than a postage stamp and are expected to replace the music CD.

In an age of downloadable music, the new  slotMusic format for distributing MP3 songs is a long shot. But it has heavy-duty support. SanDisk has been trying out the idea for a number of years. The format is now being embraced by four major record companies: EMI Music, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group. Major retailers supporting it include Best Buy and Wal-Mart. While these are big players, the move seems like a stop-gap measure to push back against the $1-per-song downloading trend that has taken over the indsutry. The companies are hoping that convenience of the memory cards will shift behavior patterns.

The slotMusic cards can fit into mobile phones, but they won’t play on Apple’s iPhone or iPod products. That may be a killer problem, since more than 4 billion songs have been downloaded from Apple’s iTunes music store since 2003. The cards store 1.1 gigabytes of data and can stream music at a high-quality level of 320 kilobytes per second. Albums are expected to cost about $15 and will be stocked near the ever-vanishing CD racks in stores.

EMI Music, the world’s third largest music label company, said it has reached a deal with Google and its YouTube property to allow YouTube users to exploit EMI music while creating videos.

The move follows Apple’s move yesterday to start selling EMI songs without copy protection (digital rights management, or DRM) through its iTunes store. It means EMI songs bought on iTunes will work on other portable music players.

Adding to the flurry of deals, Apple also said yesterday it will begin featuring YouTube videos on Apple TV within weeks. Apple is also including Google’s search and mapping applications on Apple’s iPhone, to be released next week.

EMI Music includes artists including David Bowie, Coldplay and Norah Jones.

EMI said it has “agreed to work” on models to allow access for user generated content featuring EMI-owned and copyrighted audio and video works, but didn’t provide many details. EMI did say it will use YouTube’s content identification technology to help it track and monetize its content, and to allow it to request the removal of copyrighted content (suggesting this is far from a straight-forward carte blanche for users to do anything they please).

Separately, Apple said it would start selling Apple’s TV with 160-gigabyte hard drives. Its move to allow other content, such as YouTube videos comes after some criticism that the set-top box was not delivering a big enough variety of content.