The Web site of the UK's music journal of record inked a deal today to launch a branded version of a popular, user-contributed digital-radio network.

NME.com, the Web site of the weekly New Music Express, will in June launch a beta of MyNME Radio, which is being developed by Mercora, a Silicon Valley-based company that combines Internet radio and legal music downloads into a unique product.

Mercora's service mixes peer-to-peer technology and online radio in a way that many industry insiders see as a powerful music discovery tool. It includes the ability to search, find, and listen to music on the network, but the biggest selling point is that it lets users broadcast their own collection of music to others on the network, as well as browse and listen to their friends' music collections.

Mercora said its user-contributed network now includes more than 3 million unique tracks and more than 100,000 channels of music available at any given time

NME.com is owned by Time Warner. Mercora was founded by Srivats Sampath, one of the founders of McAfee and one the original employees of Netscape.