Weeks of rumors have finally turned to reality as MySpace officially announced the MySpace Music Store, an online music portal that brought onboard the major music giants in the industry: Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group Corp and Universal Music. One name missing for now, EMI, but three seems to be the lucky number, as Apple’s iTunes store gets a fresh new rival.

News Corp. (MySpace’s parent company) officially unveiled that the three music labels are now part of a brand new joint venture. Will the iTunes Music Store manage to keep its fresh position as Number 1 music retailer in the United States? Still too early to tell, but the competition seems to be definitely on between the two.

"MySpace is already one of the largest music communities on the Internet," Thomas Hesse, president of global digital business at Sony BMG Music Entertainment, said in an interview with CNET News. "We're aligning our efforts to reach fans through every conceivable platform," he said. Financial details on the joint ventures were not made public.

At the same time, news on a possible EMI collaboration remains unclear, as none of the names involved wished to comment on it. EMI just got a new president of its digital music business in the person of Douglas Merrill, former Google executive and has not reached a deal yet for MySpace Music.

In the past years, MySpace has ventured into the online music world by signing a partnership with Snocap, a company founded by the former Napster developer Shawn Fanning. The partnership was announced in September 2006 and Snocap has become the provider of digital music retail tools for MySpace, marking the first music e-commerce deal for both companies.

“It’s really creating a robust monetization component to MySpace and having a focused music effort that could be the MTV of a new generation,” a source that wished to remain anonymous told Reuters earlier in the week about the new joint venture. Hard thing to rival iTunes, which appears to be growing stronger, but not impossible, as the new online music store looks very promising.