The Rolling Stones, one of the last marquee holdouts against online music distribution, have finally agreed to sell their music online, according to record label EMI Music. The venerable rock band’s appearance online is both a signal of the increasingly rapid mainstreaming of digital music and a welcome relief to online music companies, which have endured the absence of the …

Deep in the tense Jenin refugee camp in the Palestinian West Bank, a new file-swapping service is daring record labels and movie studios to turn their piracy-hunting into an international incident. Dubbed Earthstation 5, the new file-swapping network is openly flouting international copyright norms at a time when many older peer-to-peer companies are trying to establish themselves as legitimate technology …

A new pay-by-the-song music service is launching in Western Europe, putting an iTunes-like digital download store inside Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. Branded variously as the MSN Music Club and Tiscali Music Club, the service is actually run by online music company OD2, rather than by Microsoft itself. As with Apple Computer’s iTunes, the stores will be accessible inside the music-playing …