Mini music stores at MySpace

This is great news for musicians and more bad news for Tower Records. Not only can young musicians and garage bands introduce their music to millions of fans everywhere via MySpace, now they can sell it to them too – right from their own pages. "Assuming that the songs for sale do not violate a copyright, the artist or label can set a price and allow Web users to buy songs the way they might with services such as iTunes and Yahoo Music," the Washington Post reports. Shawn Fanning, creator of the original file-sharing program Napster, is providing the technology, the Los Angeles Times reports, through his company, Snocap, Fans get a piece of the action too, quite remarkably: They can "sell their favorite bands' tracks on their own MySpace pages, with a portion of the proceeds going to the artists." The service is being tested now, with full availability by the end of the year, according to the Post. More on MySpace recently: a commentary in Associated Content on MySpace as "the new American social icon" (interesting but not entirely accurate).