Movements in music: Napster, BitTorrent, 7digital...

The imminent MySpace Music is just one part of some subterranean movements in music tech in the past 24 hours:

BitTorrent has raised $17m in funding, bring total investment in the company to $46.5m, reports paidContent. The investment from DCM and Accel comes after the announcements of some redundancies last month, and against the wider challenge of having to rebuild the BitTorrent brand as a legal credible service - as distinct form the once-ubiquitous service mostly used for illegal file sharing.

Napster was bought by Best Buy for $121m after various scuffles between shareholders. The consumer electronics chain will use the site for its digital retail strategy and the three senior executives, Chris Gorog, Brad Duea and Chris Allen will all stay with the company until March 2012. paidContent, again, summarises the the history of US retail stores and their efforts with digital distribution services: "Lots of press releases, partnerships and experiments, but very little to show for it."

7digital's MP3 download deals with all four major labels make it the first download store in Europe to do so. It has its work cut out competing with iTunes, but is a respectable second place in the competitive UK market and now has something of a coup in having the very versatile MP3 format - which works across any brand of device or player - across the full catalogue of Sony BMG, Warner, Universal and EMI. What they don't have is the Apple walled garden - iTunes plus iPod plus iTunes Store, but though Apple does offer higher quality, DRM-free tracks at a premium under its FairPlay DRM system, that is only for EMI artists.

Last.fm was given the exclusive global preview of the new Kings of Leon album, which goes some way to show the status of the site now. Songs on Fire is fantastic, but I did like them more when that had excessive facial hair.