VentureBeat

Social networking site MySpace and music have worked well together in the past. New bands got recognition, popular bands gained new fans. Now MySpace is looking to extend that relationship by launching a full-scale music store. This launch will be happening sometime within the next 5 days, according to Reuters.

The service will be appropriately titled “MySpace Music”, and is said to have the support of at least 3 of the major labels. Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Vivendi’s Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group Corp. would each have a stake in the new service along with MySpace parent News Corp. It is not clear if the other big label, EMI, is involved.

None of the companies are talking, so details are scant at this point, but the service is said to be a direct competitor to Apple’s iTunes. It’s well known that the record labels have long thought that Steve Jobs has held too much over their industry. Their slowness in delivering DRM-free music to iTunes while giving it to AmazonMP3 may be helping that service grow (our coverage). MySpace Music could well be an attack on another front.

The fact that EMI is not known to be involved in the MySpace Music partnership makes sense as well — EMI is still the only major label giving Apple DRM-free music, so they presumably have a pretty good relationship.

MySpace Music is launching now because News Corp. and Universal Music have finally settled a longstanding lawsuit, according to Silicon Alley Insider.

[photo: flickr/orange beard] 

YouTube, the two-year-old San Mateo start-up that raced ahead to become the leader of online video sharing, is facing the fight of its life.

Microsoft’s launch of its YouTube clone, called the Soapbox, made official today — see announcement with an offering of a way to sign up for a beta account, is only the latest challenge. (The dancing man with MSN colors strikes us as somewhat unhip, but then what can we expect a corporate giant to do? In fact, when looked at again, we see it is a cute metaphor for an old fogey getting with the program.)

Its fate may really lie in excruciating talks taking place with the Universal Music Group, which must decide whether to take YouTube to court or instead embrace and even invest in it.

The YouTube story is significant because there’s more confusion about YouTube’s prospects, its inherent uniqueness and its legality than ever before. Moreover, there’s more at stake in the world of online video than most of us realized just a few months ago. It is where movies, music and advertising meet — and billions are at stake, and anxious incumbent music giants are angry. The proliferation of broadband, new technologies making loading videos dead easy, and the high price of buying music compared to simply sharing it free on YouTube, is giving that upstart the edge. –>

Here in Silicon Valley, the buzz is all about video, music and then more video — and throw in some talk about how to take it mobile. There’s a new announcement every day. (Just yesterday: Silicon Valley chip giant Intel announced a deal with AOL to place AOL Video onto Intel’s Viiv home computers. SanDisk, the Milpitas maker of music players competing with Apple’s iPod, signed a deal with Seattle’s RealNetworks, owner of music service Rhapsody, to imbed that service direclty into its Sansa e200 MP3 player. And Google is reporteldy talking with Apple about having Google vidoes downloadable to the iPod).

On the plus side for YouTube, the company announced a deal with Warner, whereby Warner will open its music library to YouTube users to integrate into their videos. But public details of the deal are few, and Warner still has the right for veto, and the royalty and revenue split agreement is unknown.

That deal came a few hours after entrepreneur Mark Cuban wrote an aggressive but notable piece titled “The coming dramatic decline of YouTube,” and outlined why YouTube is going to get sued and will implode just like Napster did in Web 1.0, even though Napster eventually cut deal with Bertelsman. In a bizarre coincidence, the Napster remnant company is losing money and just yesterday put itself on the block, as mentioned). The problem, Cuban said, is that you can search for songs on YouTube, and have them play, while minimizing the video screen — even those songs are copyrighted and no one is getting paid. If you read the comments on Cuban’s blog, you will see that outright confusion prevails about YouTube’s prospects.

YouTube’s fate may really lie in talks it’s having with Universal Music Group and Sony BMG. Fresh reports say these are talks about distribution deals. YouTube has long said it is engaged in talks, so it is difficult to say how real these reports are. Just last week Universal threatened to sue. Now apparently YouTube has offered to sell an equity stake to the labels, though that’s an easy offer to make when you are against the wall.

Finally, as Rafat at PaidContent points out, the filtering technology YouTube has to implement by the end of this year, to meet the accord with Warner Music, is significant. It is similar to technology already offered by both Audible Magic and Snocap, which works on audio — the main area of concern right now. If YouTube implements this rigorously and agrees to take down any infringing content that somehow slips past those filters, it has a pretty good defense, no?

This will be a drama to watch.

Blogging software company Six Apart announced today it has bought the RSS feed reader company, Rojo.

Rojo was just one of start-ups gunning for position in the crowded field of giving users with a way to collect and read RSS feeds, or subscriptions to news and other sources that come to you automatically. These RSS readers are popular because they save you time — you don’t have to go out and access the sites or publications yourself.

While Rojo had its fans, big companies had come along and offered competing services. Bloglines, an early leader, was bought by Ask. Yahoo has its own service, as does Google. There a bunch of others, including Newsgator and Attensa.

Six Apart’s statement about its plans didn’t sound very promising. The acquisition appeared designed to scoop up some talent: “Four people will become core members of the Six Apart Team: Chris Alden, Aaron Emigh, Andrew Bunner and Jim Ramsey,” it said.

Lower down, the statement made clear Six Apart intends to sell most of Rojo, and its Nooz service: “Rojo and Nooz will continue to be independent entities, and we expect to sell a majority interest in the services business within a few months. You can see more on Rojo’s blog as well.”

The alternative interpretation of this, of course, is that Six Apart is trying to become a private equity-like Web 2.0 investor — buying and selling companies strategically in an effort to make money. This, we doubt. But it has been playing with its money lately. It has raised $12 million earlier in March, and has bought Splashblog, and LiveJournal.

Rojo’s investors included TPG Ventures, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway, an early investor in Google via his Angel Investors fund. Liz at GigaOM notes Rojo had raised more than $3.5 million in funding.

And what’s this in our headline about Mojo, you ask? We’re referring to Rojo’s own description of itself:

Rojo means “RSS with mojo.” That’s our secret ingredient for creating the best RSS feed reader on the web and so you can discover and read news and blogs as efficiently as possible