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.

Starbucks along with Apple iTunes has announced that they will be giving away 50 million iTunes songs at Starbucks locations to help promote the mobile iTunes store and Starbucks’ Now Playing service. On October 2 the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store will launch with a service provided in Starbucks locations which will display the current song playing through the Apple iPhone in the stores and allow users to buy and download the song without paying any hotspot fees.

In the additional promotion announced today which will run from October 2 through November 7, Starbucks locations will be giving away “Song of the Day” cards that can be redeemed that the iTunes store for a free song download (selected by Starbucks). The coffee company is planning on giving away 1.5 million downloads per day to total more than 50 million songs, so the odds of you getting one when stopping through a Starbucks next month are not too shabby.

NBC was an early-adopter of Apple iTunes, being the second major company back in 2005 to sign on with Apple to provide video content for the download service. Now, a short two years later NBC has announced its intentions to end their relationship with Apple and discontinue providing content for iTunes citing that they are unhappy with iTunes pricing policy and piracy control, or lack thereof.

NBC has over 1500 hours of TV and movies currently on iTunes, and according to a NYT report the two companies are in negotiations which may mean that NBC could be doing a little bit of muscle-flexing might not really upset enough yet to want to pull all of its content.

Wal-Mart is jumping on the DRM-free bandwagon by announcing today it is making available MP3s for purchase without license restrictions. These tracks should be available starting now.

The new DRM-free tracks and albums are available major record labels such as Universal and EMI Music. The tunes will be available at 94 cents per track and $9.22 per album. Wal-Mart will continue to offer its existing WMA-format music downloads as well.

Universal Music Group has announced that it is going start offering 99 cent downloads of its online music without any copyright restrictions as somewhat of a trial starting August 21 through Jan 31. UMG says it will be offering the music tracks in the MP3 format but individual retailers will be allowed to sell them in whichever DRM-free format they wish. This comes after last month when UMG decided not to renew its contract with Apple iTunes, and although …

It looks like Apple did get the EMI catalog out by the end of the month, but barely. Today Apple launched iTunes Plus along with the iTunes 7.2 version release, which is now offering DRM-free music downloads.

For now the songs that are available without the DRM restrictions or only from EMI’s catalog (excluding the Beatles, but including Paul McCartney), but hopefully more labels will follow suit in the near future. The songs cost slightly more without the DRM at a price of $1.29 each, and any existing songs that …

BitTorrent, a name commonly known synonymously with video piracy, today has relaunched their service to provide legal downloads of feature length movies with the support of major studios.

BitTorrent plans on offering “the most comprehensive library of downloadable digital entertainment ever amassed on the Web,” according to a statement by the company. Agreements that BitTorrent has made with 20th Century Fox, Viacom, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer makes it seems as if this statement may just be accurate. The digital entertainment company plans to start out with over 5,000 “downloadable” media …