Jumping on the online personal music storage bandwagon, Sony Music Entertainment will fund a new "digital locker" company that will allow consumers to store and stream their entire music collections online and on-demand, according to Fred Ehrlich, Sony Music president of new technology and business development. The locker service is expected to be free, Ehrlich says, with revenues coming from advertising and other ancillary streams. Despite its Sony backing, the company will be "label agnostic," he says. The new company is believed to be talking with other companies about securing needed licenses for streaming audio.

The Sony-backed locker company will be competing with such existing sites as Myplay.com and MP3.com's My.MP3.com, as well as the forthcoming startup musicbank, which has funding from Bertelsmann Ventures, among others. Sony is among the labels still embroiled in a copyright infringement lawsuit with MP3.com over its streaming service, which was judged to have violated label copyrights by not securing proper licenses before launch.

The new company, which will be based in San Francisco and Los Angeles, is currently staffing up and is tentatively slated for launch in late summer or early fall.

Among the new staffers are employees of Uville.com, the music portal announced last year by Sony. Elements of that site?which never officially launched but has been quietly online since last fall with music news, charts, and more?are being folded into the new online venture, which has not yet been named.