Online Music | featured news

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.

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.

Pandora shares are trading sharply lower Wednesday after CNBC reported that Facebook plans to unveil plans for a rival online music service at the upcoming F8 developers conference on September 22. My colleague Nicole Perlroth notes this morning that Facebook is expected to unveil integration partnerships with the online music services Spotify, MOG and RDIO. ...

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

Apple says people snapped up more than 450,000 copies of Beatles albums plus two million individual songs during the Fab Four's first week on sale through iTunes.

According to reports Google is about to get into the online music business with the launch of "Google Audio."