London - Amazon.com (NASD: AMZN) on Wednesday launched its MP3 store in the U.K., Music Ally reports. The store is offering several albums, from artists including Coldplay and Kings of Leon, for an introductory promotional price of about $4.43, while many other new albums are priced at about $9.59. Individual tracks at the store range in price from about $0.87 to more than $1.20. Music Ally noted that at launch, the store is lacking some big U.K. artists' music, including Arctic Monkeys, Oasis and Franz Ferdinand

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Los Angeles - News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) MySpace on Wednesday launched a public beta of a mobile streaming video service worldwide, allowing users to view videos they've uploaded or marked as a favorite on their mobile devices. The company tapped RipCode to provide on-demand video transcoding for the service, available to MySpace Mobile's estimated 10 million monthly unique users.

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Berlin - Songbeat on Wednesday announced the official launch of its music discovery and download service, which records streaming versions of songs offered on free services like SeeqPod, Project Playlist and Last.fm to a user's computer and can automatically sync them into an iTunes library. The basic version of the application allows 25 free downloads, while a premium version with unlimited downloads costs $29.99. The questionably-legal service offers this caveat to users: "It is your responsibility to ascertain whether any copyright, patent or other licenses are necessary and to obtain any such licenses to serve and/or create, compress or download such media and content."

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Los Angeles - MySpace has apologized for apparently mistakenly taking over the URL that a Canadian band called "Mobile" had chosen on the site, Hypebot reported. The band "Mobile" had been using MySpace.com/Mobile for the past two years, until MySpace took the site over last week and redirected traffic to its own MySpace Mobile service (Mobile.MySpace.com or M.MySpace.com). "MySpace has reinstated the registered URL www.myspace.com/mobile to the band -- this was an error on our part and we apologize for any inconvenience caused. The band's profile has not been altered in any way," MySpace told Hypebot in a statement.

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Los Angeles - Apple (NASD: AAPL) has provided some details of the top-selling albums and songs of the year at its iTunes Store, revealing that Coldplay's "Viva la Vida" album and Leona Lewis' song "Bleeding Love" were the most popular downloads of 2008, the Associated Press reported.

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Sunnyvale, Calif. - Driven largely by rising royalty rates, Yahoo (NASD: YHOO) said on Wednesday that it has signed a deal that will move its Launchcast Internet radio service under the umbrella of CBS Radio (NYSE: CBS).

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Mountain View, Calif. - Google's (NASD: GOOG) YouTube has announced an online musical collaboration that will cull online auditions and create a "YouTube Symphony Orchestra," which will perform at New York's Carnegie Hall in April. Musicians can upload videos of themselves performing composer Tan Dun's "Internet Symphony No. 1 'Eroica'" and another standard piece. Winners will then be flown to New York for the live performance, while the audio from their audition videos will be edited together into a single mashed-up orchestral version of the work.

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Orlando, Fla. - eJamming, a developer of real-time online music collaboration technology, said on Tuesday that it has licensed its flagship product to Viacom's (NYSE: VIA) MTV Networks Music Group. The company's eJamming AUDiiO will allow MTV to integrate a social network that lets musicians find collaborators and play live together over the Internet into its virtual worlds and new music sites.

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New York - While digital music sales in the U.S. are expected to grow from 18% to account for 41% of overall music sales in five years, this will not compensate for a decline in overall sales, which will shrink over the next five years from $10.2 billion to $9.8 billion, according to a forecast from Forrester's JupiterResearch.

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Dallas - Video rental giant Blockbuster (NYSE: BBI) announced on Tuesday that it has signed a three-year deal with concert promoter and venue owner Live Nation (NYSE: LYV), to serve as the exclusive physical retail ticketing outlet for the company's new in-house ticketing company. Under the agreement, Live Nation will sell tickets to concerts and other events at approximately 500 Blockbuster company-owned stores "in strategically chosen markets across the country that mirror Live Nation's concert venue platform footprint."

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Los Angeles - Former Vice President Al Gore and Live Earth founder Kevin Wall said on Monday that Live Earth India, concert originally slated for Dec. 7 in Mumbai, has been cancelled in light of the recent tragic attacks there. The concert was set to feature local stars like Aishwarya Rai alongside Bon Jovi, Roger Waters and others. "We will continue to work for solutions to the climate crisis for the good of the people of India and around the world. But for now, our thoughts and our prayers are with the victims of this terrible attack, with the bereaved, with the people of Mumbai and with everyone in India," Live Earth India said in a statement.

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London - Microsoft's (NASD: MSFT) MSN site in the U.K. has launched a new feature that allows independent artists upload their music videos for viewing by the site's 5.4 million unique monthly visitors. The MSN Unsigned site, which also features a music podcast and articles on the music industry, will be accessible only to U.K. residents.

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Los Angeles - Apple's (NASD: AAPL) iPhone App Store has now released over 10,000 applications for the device, according to a report on 148Apps.com, which tracks iPhone applications. The largest segment of applications are games (2,333), followed by entertainment (1,122), utilities (1,015), education (737) and productivity (517); some one-quarter are available free of charge. In related iPhone news, hackers have been able to boot the Linux operating system on the iPhone, the Linux on the iPhone blog reports. However, key elements such as touch-screen functionality, sound and networking are not yet supported.

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Los Angeles - Joost, the peer-to-peer-based streaming TV service, has launched a new free application for Apple's (NASD: AAPL) iPhone that lets users stream its full content library of 46,000 movies, TV episodes and music videos over a Wi-Fi connection. The service does not work over a 3G or EDGE network connection.

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Los Angeles - Video game publisher Acclaim has released a public beta of its free, music-based online game, "Rockfree," which aims to compete with more elaborate, costlier titles like "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band." The browser-based game, set to officially launch in the first quarter of 2009, features licensed tracks from Warner Music, Sony, EMI and WaveGroup.

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Amsterdam - SellaBand, a fan-financed recordings venture for unsigned artists, announced on Monday that it has partnered with Arena Works Entertainment on ArenaFest, a festival tour of 91 venues that will feature unsigned bands, extreme sports, video game tournaments and even a dating game in what are being billed as "the first live social network event(s) ever."

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Atlanta - Band Metrics, a provider of Web-based analytics tools for the music industry, announced that it has raised an undisclosed amount of angel financing, led by investor Allen Graber.

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Nashville, Tenn. - PassAlong Networks, a provider of digital music services, plans to close on a new $30 million funding round later this month, VentureWire reported.

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New York - Major record label Universal Music Group announced on Tuesday that it has partnered with instant messaging and group chat service provider Meebo, and will provide Meebo users with ad-supported music videos. The promotional videos will initially feature Kanye West, Ludacris, and The Killers. UMG will also embed Meebo Rooms on official artist pages

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