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SoundCloud, a startup focusing on audio-sharing in social media, has announced a new (and reportedly sizable) round of funding. The round, which was led by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, may have been as large as $50 million, TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher reports. A SoundCloud rep confirmed all the details except the amount in an email exchange with VentureBeat this afternoon.

With Google incessantly branching out into even more ventures such as music and social networking, its search business could continue to act as a minor Catch-22 situation in future by helping competition in other business lines.

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

You can't Google this. OK, maybe you can. But MC Hammer doesn't want you to. The venerable rapper, who helped usher hip-hop into the pop mainstream in the early '90s, has rolled out a search engine he hopes will outperform Google, Bing and other established tools.

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. ...

Spotify, the European transplant that made a big debut splash in the United States last month, has reportedly hit 1.4 million U.S. customers in just under a month. Citing a “source familiar with the company’s operations, All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka reported the numbers, along with the tidbit that the site reportedly has 175,000 paying customers since its July 14 debut.

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.

Even one of online video's biggest stars isn't immune to copyright claims....

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

Pandora set terms for its initial public offering that value the Internet radio company at about $2.56 billion, in the latest test of investors' appetite for fast-growing Web companies.