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.

"A surprisingly high percentage of America's recording heritage since the early part of the 20th century has been lost due to neglect and deterioration. The donation...will help maintain the inter-generational connection that is essential to keeping alive, in our collective national memory, the music and sound recordings meaningful to past generations."

In fact, a congressional study found only 14 percent of commercially recordings made before 1965 are available to the public and only 10 percent of music released in the U.S. in the 1930s can be accessed by the public.

The recordings will be digitized at the Library's Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Virginia, where the masters will also be stored. The Library is preparing a dedicated website to debut in the spring on which they will stream recordings from the collection.

From Ella to Pine Top

Other highlights in the collection include the following.

• Ella Fitzgerald's and Louis Armstrong's duet "Frim Fram Sauce"
• Bing Crosby's 1947 version of "White Christmas"
• The Mills Brothers' "Paper Doll"
• Josh White singing "Jim Crow"
• Machito and his Afro-Cuban All Stars Mercury recordings
• Clarence "Pine Top" Smith's "NowIAintGotNothingAtAll.mp3"

Additional artists represented include Billie Holiday, Tommy Dorsey, Irving Berlin, Jimmy Dorsey, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, and Dinah Washington. Subsidiary labels include Decca, Mercury, Vocalion and Brunswick.

Given this is the first collection of masters donated by a major recording company, the hope is that other such companies will follow suit. One can see the wisdom of donating 5,000 linear feet of masters that are no longer being used and are taking up commercial space.

The 200,000-plus recordings provide a tangible bump to the Library's audio collection of about 3 million items.

We sent a host of technical and access questions to the Library but, despite repeated requests, never got answers to them.

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.

The practice of hyping music before release was part of a strategy of having songs hit the number one position on the chart upon release, and The Guardian says that industry insiders believe this new "on air, on sale" policy will make it easier for songs to climb the charts as excitement grows, rather than simply appear on the charts on release day, only to fall off immediately afterwards.

Sony and Universal will start this new policy in the U.K. It's not clear at this time if other record labels - or labels in other countries - will follow suit.

Of course, nor is it clear that the lack of "instant gratification" in getting new songs is really the impetus behind music piracy.

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.

Already the project has support from several industry giants, including EU operators like Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), Spain's Telefonica and Telecom Italia, hardware makers Samsung and Sony Ericsson and standards body the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

According to the project's homepage, webinos "will define and deliver an Open Source Platform and software components for the Future Internet in the form of web runtime extensions, to enable web applications and services to be used and shared consistently and securely over a broad spectrum of converged and connected devices."

In other words, webinos goes beyond simply touting the Web and its coding language, HTML, as the standard for apps, and instead wants to develop a common set of APIs (APIs, or application programming interfaces, are developer tools) that would allow applications to run in a Web environment. To do so, webinos offers a single "virtual" device that can consist of all the devices owned by a user. Services running on this platform could then take advantage of the capabilities of any given device, without having to be specifically coded for that system.

Fragmentation is Bad for Business

Project head Stephan Steglich explained to the BBC how extreme platform fragmentation is becoming a costly matter for business. "Companies can afford to have an app on two or at most three platforms," he said. "They're extremely costly to develop and ensure the user experience. That's what we want to address - to provide a system that runs on all these platforms and domains, where the developer comes up with one application for one platform and lets you run it on all these devices - mobiles, automotive, gaming, and so on."

On the mobile front, the fragmentation issue was also recently highlighted in an interview between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and tech news blog TechCrunch. The young exec admitted that the numerous platforms are even a problem for a company of Facebook's size, saying "[fragmentation is] kind of a disaster right now. I really hope that the direction that this stuff goes in is one where there's more of a standard...it's pretty hard for us to build a lot of new products and build them all for these different platforms."

Other Efforts, Little Hope?

Webinos isn't the only project attempting to address fragmentation issues, however. Earlier this year, mobile operators joined forces to create the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) project, a more commercial effort with many of the same players involved. WAC is reportedly doing much of the same thing as Webinos, and is also collaborating with the W3C on its efforts.

Unfortunately, despite the big name participants and funding, some industry insiders are doubtful that Webinos will be able to revolutionize anything. The BBC cited content delivery provider Saffron Digital's chief, Shashi Fernando, as saying that there is no interest in standardization of platforms because companies need to differentiate their product. He specifically called out Apple as the "big bear in the room," who won't likely participate in these efforts.

That said, even if Apple remained a holdout going forward, a semi-universal standard holds promise. And the more bodies that participate in the effort, the better for developers, business and end users alike.

It's true that MySpace owes much of its success to its popularity with musicians, and the service could certainly be a game changer. Search for almost any major musical act in Google and you're almost certain to find three things on the first page of results: the artist's official page, the artist's wikipedia page, and the artist's MySpace page. With it's position as the current generation's MTV, the potential for MySpace to serve as a serious hub for music sales is believable. And as we noted in February, chief rival Facebook has a long way to go to catch up with MySpace in the area of music.

But MySpace doesn't just cater to the major acts -- much of the appeal of the social network is in the ability to connect directly with local, long tail acts. That's where its true roots lie. As Matt Rosoff writes on CNET's Crossfade blog, "major label acts are a small part of the MySpace experience... MySpace is the ultimate long tail site for musicians, where bar bands and small-town heroes can appear in the same context as the biggest bands in the world."

What we're looking for next from MySpace is to extend the functionality of their music store to every musical act using the site. That would certainly be a game changer and would make it easier for small acts to build awareness and cultivate their "true fans." In essence, it would make it simple for any small band to put out their work on the web's label: MySpace.