Musicians love their art, but it isn’t easy making music and having to worry about turning pages of sheet music at the same time. But the Smartstand concept can help. It features a simple multi-touch interface and a hands-free page-turning pedal to make sure that you can turn the page without missing a beat.

It includes an online music school, instrument tuner, downloads and more. Musicians would love this and it would make their lives much easier. Hopefully we will see these everywhere very soon.

According to the Telegraph, music download site 7Digital will be launching a service for BlackBerry this September. It’s based around an application that will be available in BlackBerry’s App World. Customers will be able to download music directly to their phone for 79 cents a song. “Most” tracks will be DRM-free.

RIM CEO Jim Balsillie sure seems excited about it. He sees the market as experiencing the “birth of digital music 2.0.” We don’t know about that, but it sure is exciting for BB owners.

Anyone who owns an iPhone will tell you the best thing about the device is the App Store and the slew of free and paid games and applications available to add to the iPhone experience. The App Store has been so successful that most every other smartphone maker is now offering its own application store.

Sirius XM Satellite Radio has announced that its iPhone App is now the top free app in the music category. The app has been downloaded 1 million times in the two weeks since it was available starting on June 18.

If subscription music services are for you, check out Napster, who is about to cut their price to $60 per year and let you keep a handful of tracks forever to boot. Beginning tonight, Napster will launch its new $5 per month deal that gives subscribers unlimited, on-demand streaming access to Napster’s library of music. That’s 7 million tracks from major and independent publishers.

Best Buy’s music service will even let you keep up to five unrestricted “CD quality” MP3 tracks every month. Pretty sweet deal.

When Microsoft launched its Zune DAP it hoped that the device would dethrone Apple as the leader in the digital music category. That failed to happen and Microsoft languishes in third spot in sales behind Apple and SanDisk.

Microsoft has announced a new exclusive animated series for the Zune that the software giant hopes will lure digital content fans to the Zune platform. The series is called City Council 3050 AD and the pilot episode will debut in Seattle later this month.

There has never been a Nokia phone that I have been interested in. In fact most of the handsets on the market are boring by my jaded standards. I do like the iPhone, but I will say it’s getting a bit boring and I am looking for the next cool handset.

Nokia has been offering its 5800 XpressMusic handset for a while in Europe, and not so long ago it brought the device to America. There were some issues with connectivity that forced the phone off the market for a while shortly after is US launch.

Napster has walked onto Apple’s beach and kicked sand in the face of iTunes. Napster now claims to have the largest MP3 store around with 6 million tracks. Napster also claims that its tracks are iPhone and iPod compatible.

Napster says that its MP3 store is 50% larger than any other MP3 store and has the largest major label catalog of any digital music store. It also claims to have the largest catalog of independent music available as well.

Apple’s iTunes online music download service has moved into the number 2 position as the second largest U.S. music retailer, beaten out this time only by Wal-Mart. We had seen just last July that iTunes had moved into the number 3 spot, beating out Amazon and following both Best Buy and Wal-Mart, and the trend so far is continuing in Apple’s favor.

[NOTE: With CES now over, we are winding down our CES coverage. Expect to see a trickle of stories on trade show announcements next week, but also expect we will be focused on MacWorld and anything else that comes our way. Thanks to everyone who has visited and linked to us - we enjoyed providing you indepth coverage of new product releases.]

Sony seems to have found enough success with its mylo Internet device to have unleashed at CES this week a new generation of the product. The updated Sony mylo goes on sale this month for around $300.

The Sony COM-2 mylo communicator, as it is being called, comes in black or white body colors and has a backlit, slide out QWERTY keyboard. Like its predecessor it lets you connect to open wireless hotspots to instant message with your buddies. You can also use it to view Web videos, take pictures and post them directly to a variety of sites, use widgets to do various online functions, play games and enjoy various media formats.

Get more details on the new Sony mylo after the jump.

Haier America (?!) this week used CES as its platform for getting into the wireless MP3 player market. It unveiled a new line up of flash and hard drive based portable media players which make use of online services like Rhapsody to collect content wirelessly. This players are called the ibiza Rhapsody and it is available now in at least a 30GB hard drive model.

The ibiza Rhapsody players for Haier let you, in summary, have “Wi-Fi enabled access to unlimited digital entertainment possibilities. With the ibiza Rhapsody, consumers can now enjoy the Rhapsody digital music service, AOL Video and other digital content from just about anywhere there’s an available Wi-Fi hotspot.” You can also directly subscribe to a variety of podcasts from the player and enjoy an integrated FM radio.

Get the full details after the jump.

Just before the close of 2007 Warner Music Group joined EMI and Universal by dropping their digital copying restrictions on downloaded songs and offering DRM-free music through Amazon. Today Sony BMG, the last of the big four and the second largest music company in the world, has joined in and removed copying restrictions on their downloaded music and are offering their songs through Amazon as well. This makes Amazon the first online retailer to offer DRM-free song downloads from the world’s four largest music companies.

DRM’s previously had been required by these large music companies in order to prevent songs from being illegally copied which was believed to hurt overall music sales. The DRM would often limit the number of times and devices a song could be copied, such as a limited number of computers or a particular brand of MP3 player. Most consumers and rival media players manufacturers have been generally apposed to the restrictions due to these limitations.

XIAS is looking to tangle with the Apple iPod ecosystem as it brings to the Consumer Electronics Show its own new MP3 player and online music site. The new XIAS PV-4022 is set to price at around $110.

The XIAS PV-4022 is a 4GB flash memory based MP3 player which can hold and playback up to 1,000 WMA and MP3 music files. It will also be able to playback WMV video files on its 2.2-inch viewing screen. The PV-4022 sports an icon-based menu navigation system and will let you play/record FM radio and voice.

Warner Music Group announced on Thursday that it would join the ranks of EMI Group and Universal Music Group as the third of the four large music labels to offer their digital music titles for sale without any type of copy protection software. Warner will offer its catalog through Amazon in the common MP3 formats that are free to copy to any player or computer, any number of times.

This move comes after Warner Chairman and CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. defended DRMs at the 3GSM World Conference in Barcelona in February, stressing the importance of interoperability over DRM restrictions likely due to Apple’s DRM through iTunes which restricts music files to be played only on Apple devices.

Today Microsoft has officially launched the next-generation Zune media player which consists of three new models launching in November, two of which house flash memory. The release also brings updates to the Zune Marketplace and an associated online social networking site centered around the player and sharing music.

The rumors leaked yesterday turned out to be pretty accurate for the most part. Microsoft is releasing two flash memory-based players in 4GB and 8GB capacities that look similar to the new Nano’s and will retail for $149 and $199 respectively, which is also similar to Apple’s Nano pricing. There is also an smaller, thinner 80GB Zune with a hard drive that will retail for $249 which comes only in black and has a 3.2-inch display. The flash-based models come in black, red, green and pink, no more brown.

Amazon.com went full steam into downloadable MP3s today, unveiling a beta version of Amazon MP3, its new digital music download store. Most songs will range in price from 89 to 99 cents, while albums will run you $5.99 to $9.99.

Amazon MP3 features over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists represented by over 20,000 major and independent labels. All downloads will be MP3s which are DRM-free, meaning there’s no restrictions on what device or music management software is used to play them. Songs can even be burned to CD.