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Universal Music Group, largest of the "big four" music companies, has made the single largest donation of music ever to the Library of Congress. The donation consists of over 200,000 metal masters, discs and tape from the late Twenties to 1950. Highlights include the master of Louis Armstrong's version of "AintMisbehavin.mp3" and Les Paul's "Guitar Boogie."

Although conserving such a large and important collection of American music is important in general, what makes it really exciting are the plans to digitize it and make it available online.

In an attempt to combat digital piracy, Sony Music and Universal have announced that they will put digital singles for sale the same day that the music hits the airwaves. According to record label executives, the move is meant to combat what The Guardian calls the "impatient X Factor generation" who are unwilling to wait what is sometimes up to six weeks between a radio release of a song and its actual sales release.

Whether or not that length of time is what's contributed to rampant piracy of digital music, there's no doubt that early releases of songs on the radio do tend to find themselves available for download illegally shortly thereafter.

A research project that aims to develop a standard for universal applications has just received £10 million in funding from the European Union. The project, called Webinos, is being led by the Fraunhofer Institute, the same group that developed the technology behind the ubiquitous music file format MP3.

Webinos' end goal is to create a framework for Web applications across mobile, PC, home media (TV) and even in-car devices which doesn't require the apps to be reprogrammed for each platform.

A few months ago ReadWriteWeb asked the question, "What are Hulu's Mysterious Plans?" Our own Sarah Perez covered the rumors surrounding a subscription model, premium services and of course, the much anticipated iPhone application. While Hulu continues to keep mum on its new monetization plans, today's reports reveal that the company is focusing on its music-related content.

On the same day that Apple announced that iTunes had surpassed Wal-Mart as the number one music retailer in the United States, MySpace announced that it had joined with three of four major labels (EMI isn't on board yet) to launch their own iTunes killer. As they did previously for Amazon, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony BMG have agreed to let MySpace sell music DRM-free. But the big question is: Why just the majors?