DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS WEEK IN REVIEW

• Perhaps the biggest news this week didn’t happen at all, with a widely-expected Supreme Court decision now scheduled for Monday morning. That made this week the calm before the storm, with Monday certain to be an intense day.
• – In the mobile music space, Verizon pointed to a music service by the end of the year, and Japanese mobile operator KDDI counted its 10 millionth full-song, over-the-air download. Meanwhile, Sprint has slowly started to open its closed network, leading to speculation that Verizon will soon follow suit. And BT started testing a mobile service that will deliver tv and radio streams, with Virgin Mobile part of the initial rollout.
• Satellite radio also saw some activity this week, with both XM and Sirius getting a green light to open services in Canada. That will be a tricky rollout for both companies, with a large number of Canadians already tapped into the US-based services. Meanwhile, Sirius inked a deal to transmit BBC Radio 1 broadcasts.
• In the P2P world, BigChampagne joined forces with Yahoo Music, further widening its reporting breadth. And StreamCast unveiled an upgraded Morpheus application, timed to coincide with the imminent Supreme Court ruling. And in the lab, Microsoft continued to tinker with a next-generation peer-to-peer concept, with its Avalance system emulating aspects of the BitTorrent protocol.
• In online music, MySpace pointed to possible e-commerce relationships with Napster and RealNetworks. And New Jersey approved a sales tax on internet content, effectively raising the price of an iTunes download to $1.05.
• Several regulatory proposals also surfaced this week. In Canada, a bill was introduced that would update various parts Canadian copyright law to better address digital formats. In the US, Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters proposed an overhaul of Section 115 of the Copyright Act.