MySpace Music will offer music from Sony BMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, will be reportedly be funded with $120 million from MySpace.

The site’s plans to make bank with downloads, ring tones, music paraphernalia and of course – branded ad campaigns.

AdBrite has subtly shifted its focus recently, putting larger sites in its crosshairs. “We’ve expanded from our roots as a self-serve tool for small pubs to serve a diverse set of sites, including some of the biggest premium publishers,” said Paul Levine, VP of marketing at AdBrite in an e-mail. “This scale – across large and small sites – is significant in that it allows advertisers to reach their target users across a wide variety of geographies, demographics, behaviors and contexts.”

AdBrite now serves eight of the 20 largest U.S. online properties. The network has mushroomed in the past 18 months, providing ads to 50,000 sites in February of this year, compared to 20,000 in September of 2006. According to comScore, AdBrite is the fourth-largest ad network by pages viewed.

Part of AdBrite’s swift growth has been attributed to its horizontal ad platform. “We offer text, banner, full-page ads and other innovative products like BritePic and InVideo,” Levine said. “We launched banners about a year-and-a-half ago and they’ve become our biggest movers from a revenue perspective.”

Clients also go to AdBrite for its high levels of transparency. “So many other networks are blind,” Levine said. “That’s because a lot of publishers don’t want to disclose who they’re working with. But our clients care where they run and where their positioned on the page. Brand advertisers like that we offer a suite of products that they can pick and choose from – and they can see, in a line item by line item fashion, where they’re running and how often. It helps them optimize and manage their campaigns on a site-by-site basis.”

By expanding its strength as a self-serve publisher marketplace to partner with large sites and specialty content sites, advertisers can target millions of unique visitors per month. New clients include General Motors, Sony BMG, Verizon and Live Nation.

“AdBrite helped SONY BMG deliver our artists’ products to targeted audiences across a large, diverse set of high-quality sites,” said Kyle Sherwin, VP of media at SONY BMG.  “AdBrite’s mix of ad products and transparent marketplace model have made for several successful campaigns.  In addition to providing great results, AdBrite offers terrific client service.”

The move is widely seen as a bid to compete with YouTube. The MSN video service will now offer clips from MTV shows like South Park, Pimp My Ride and Punk’d plus music videos, interviews and backstage footage of concerts from Sony BMG’s artists. The new videos will be added to MSN’s existing selection of video news, gossip and entertainment.

MSN video currently has an audience of about 100 million in Europe. Most of Western Europe an the U.K. will get the ramped up service shortly; Denmark, Belgium and Norway will later this year.

Instead, Universal has said it will market music to Apple at will, which could give UMG the power to remove songs from iTunes at short notice if pricing terms are not agreed upon. This is an attempt for UMG to regain a bit of leverage; however it may come at the cost of a showdown with Steve Jobs.

Artists include U2, Elvis Costello, Jay-Z and Shania Twain to name a few. Major record labels have been building tensions with Apple for some time and these negotiations may be seen as the tipping point. Music business insiders have been concerned that Apple has almost created a monopoly on the market with the pricing they have put on music and the iPod’s lack of compatibility with other music services.

If Universal pulls the plug on iTunes, Apple could lose access to the record labels responsible for one out of every three new releases sold in the United States. This could prove to be very upsetting to brand new iPhone owners since the technology allow access to the iTunes program as well, making it possible to download music onto your phone.

Should Apple be the one to refuse to carry UMG’s music, the company would suffer the loss of the upper hand on the digital music market. iTunes as well as other sources account for more than 15% of UMG worldwide revenue this first quarter, which is more than $200 million.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment, number two on the totem pole, has just signed a one year contract with iTunes so the potential flight of UMG would not necessarily cause an uprising against Apple.

Apple has sold over 100 million iPods which, being tied to iTunes, has made Apple the leading seller of digital music by a large margin. iTunes is responsible for 76% of digital music sales…and climbing. The company is the number three music seller over all, behind Wal-Mart and Best Buy. With the sales of iPhones remaining to be seen, the number is sure to increase.

Jobs contends that the 99 cent price point of songs(more for songs without piracy protection) is what keeps generating new business and reduces piracy. However, music executives are pushing for Apple to charge more for popular songs and capitalize on demand, or charge less for special promotions.

Even though he is unwilling to change the price of songs, Jobs is also unwilling to license Apple’s proprietary copy restriction software to other manufacturers that would allow other players to play iTunes music, and iPod owners to buys from other sites as well. Jobs argues that sharing software would increase the amount of hacking and other issues.

Apple has asked for music companies to drop their insistence on copy protection. Only EMI, one of the four music companies, has made a deal to sell unrestricted music on iTunes.