The ambitious new MySpace Music joint venture will launch this evening at midnight PST at music.myspace.com. All four major labels - Universal, Warner, Sony and EMI - are on board (EMI was a last minute addition). Also joining the venture is The Orchard, an independent music distributor, and four major publishing companies. Basically, everyone who controls rights to music is part of the new venture.

MySpace Music allows users to stream virtually any song ever published for free. Users can also create playlists that contain up to 100 songs and share them with others. Any song can also be downloaded in non-DRM MP3 format, for a fee, from Amazon’s music download service. And if you want that song as a ringtone, you can get it as well via Jamster.

Song streaming is supported via advertising on the site, and major advertisers like McDonalds, Sony Pictures, State Farm and Toyota are already signed up.

The site isn’t live, but we’ve included a number of screenshots supplied by MySpace (and it looks like the leaked screen shots were real).

Music Discovery

This isn’t just streaming music on demand. The playlist functionality and sharing will let users discover new music as well from the 5 million artists (a mix of major, unknown, and indie acts) that populate MySpace Music.

MySpace will promote popular playlists from users and will also create their own Top 100 lists from all users as well as just your friends, coworkers, etc. So each user will have personalized music recommendations from their friends.

MySpace Music: So Awesome, It’s Illegal?

MySpace Music goes a long way towards music’s inevitable future where all recorded music will be free. They, along with services like iMeem, are now giving on demand streaming music at a zero price point to users, which was inconceivable even a couple of years ago.

But the joint venture also raises legal concerns because it isn’t clear how labels are being compensated. They clearly own stock in the new company, which may be valued as high as $2 billion already. But what isn’t known is if MySpace has a special deal with the labels that lets them avoid paying per-stream fees for songs like everyone else does. Companies like Rhapsody, Last.fm and iMeem pay a reported $.005 to $.01 per song stream. If MySpace is paying less than that, there may be antitrust and price discrimination concerns. MySpace won’t comment on their deals with labels, other than to say that they are paying for the music. More transparency would go a long way towards helping us understand if these deals are fair to the market in general. Without that information, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that the labels are in this for the stock value of the entity and are willing to burn other Internet players to give it a competitive advantage.

More screenshots below:

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After being passed up by Google for an acquisition in the $200-million range, social news site Digg is going it alone with a fresh $28.7 million infusion of capital. The C round was led by new investor Highland Capital Partners, which as joined by existing investors Greylock Partners, Omidyar Network, SVB Capital. That brings the total amount the company has raised to $40 million since it was founded four years ago. Founder Kevin Rose may have taken some cash off the table, Om is reporting.

The company has big plans for the new cash. It will double its current staff to 150 over the next year or so, move to a new corporate headquarters, localize Digg sites for international markets, give publishers better analytics, and spend more on marketing. Digg will also no doubt try to improve its service by making its recommendations even better and more targeted to each individual member. (A partnership with Facebook that is about to launch should prove interesting in this regard).

Digg claims 30 million monthly unique users. ComScore, however, counts 15.8 million uniques worldwide as of August, and 6 million in the U.S., both of which were down from July. (Quantcast shows 21.4 million global uniques, and 11.4 million U.S.). At least in the U.S., Digg’s traffic seems to be flattening. So you can see why the company wants to emphasize global expansion. Here is a chart of its U.S. traffic:

And here is a chart of global traffic:

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I don’t think Ulf Washbusch, until recently a Product Marketing Manager for Google Mobile, should be expecting to get his old job back after yesterday’s comments on the new Android phone.

In a blog post he says the phone’s physical design hasn’t changed in 2.5 years, and calls it ugly and old fashioned. He also criticizes the color choices:

It’s funny - but the first time I heard about Android was about 2.5 years ago, when Eric Schmidt told me about the device at Stanford after I got a job offer from Google (yet before I accepted it!). Since then I have seen many iterations of the software. The software. Not the device itself, because sadly it hasn’t changed in many years. The reason many people see the phone as ugly and old-fashioned is simply… because it IS! It’s a design unchanged for at least two years, without iterations on it besides color schemas (it’s now available in Zune-brown along with white and black) and the silly ‘with Google’ description on the back. Don’t ask me what ‘with Google’ means. I didn’t understand it back then and still don’t understand it today.

Ulf adds more thoughts on his Facebook profile: “Ulf is disappointed but not surprised about the ‘G1′. Where’s the cheap data plan? Where do I plug in my headphones? No video player? How do I get contacts in it?”

He’s now working at MySpace, where he says he runs their mobile product operations. My guess is MySpace won’t be thrilled with the blog post, given how cozy they’ve been with Google since joining the Open Social coalition a year ago.

I’d also be surprised if Ulf is correct that the phone itself hasn’t changed in 2.5 years, which predates the first launch of the iPhone. Did it really have a touchscreen then? And a compass, accelerometer and GPS?

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