Music Streaming | featured news

Music streaming service Spotify makes its first moves in Latin America and Asia, amid rumours Apple may be preparing a similar product.

Pandora pays over 2,000 artists more around $10,000 a year, and over 800 make $50,000. Top-tier artists like Adele are in the $1 million range, while others are tripling that sum. Not bad, in other words, especially since this is only taking into account Pandora payments, not those from Rhapsody, Spotify, or any other online streaming service. In fact, Pandora only accounts for about 6.5% of all online radio.

Apple is in talks to license music for a custom-radio service similar to the popular one operated by Pandora Media, in what would be a bid by the hardware maker to expand its dominance in online music.

Figuring out just how lucrative streaming services like Spotify or Apple’s iTunes Match cloud feature, which streams you songs you already own from the cloud, is tough. Mostly, that’s because there is a lack of transparency from both parties. The artists are at times reluctant to share numbers and the streaming services don’t want those deals exposed either.

On Monday, SoundExchange, a nonprofit group that processes payments for online streams, will announce that it has paid $1 billion to artists and record companies since its founding in 2000.

The online music service is allowing third parties to write add-on apps adding functionality to its music player.

Google has launched an online music store in the US, which will allow devices running its Android software to buy, store and stream MP3 files. EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal and 23 independent labels are providing content to create a library of 13 million songs.

Broadband provider Virgin Media offers customers six months of free access to Spotify's premium service.

With the U.S. launch of Spotify, the long wait for a better web music service is over, and a new era of on-demand music streaming is about to begin. Here's how you can join in the fun.

Buyer's remorse already may be setting in for some investors in Internet radio station Pandora Media....