There's a lot to love about the Pandora streaming music service. If you put together just the right combination of musical ingredients, you've got the modern-day equivalent of the perfect mixtape. Sending your brilliant Pandora station to a friend or 2 (or 200!) just got easier, with the addition of Facebook and Twitter sharing.

Until now, the only option for sharing your streaming radio stations was email. That feature is still around, including personalized "Station Gifting," which is a bit like a Pandora e-card. Twitter and Facebook sharing work with single songs or whole stations, and they place a link (along with any comments you want to add) into your public feed. Unfortunately, you still can't use these features to share with an individual friend via direct message, so you'll have to stick to email sharing for that.

[via CNET]

Online music streaming / discovery site Pandora have released their 'Pandora Mobile' Android application in the Android Market (for U.S. users).

Pandora Mobile allows you to create a personalised radio stream to listen to directly on your device. Simply enter an artist name, track name or a classical composer and Pandora will create a virtual 'radio station' that plays matching music and music that it deems fit for your tastes.

If you already have stations set up via the Pandora website, they will also become accessible on your device. The application includes a homescreen widget for convenient control of your playback and convenient 'thumbs up' and 'thumbs down' of the current track.

As mentioned above, Pandora Mobile -- as with the web based version -- is only available to U.S. users at the time of writing. If you're in other countries and you're looking for an alternative, check out imeem or last.fm (also free on the Android Market) or the recently launched Spotify streaming service (premium subscription required).

The application is enjoying a very positive reception from users - the current rating on the Android Market is '4.54 out of 5' - a positively glowing recommendation! Have you installed? Tell us what you think!

One of the many perks the Pandora streaming music offers its subscribers is access to the Pandora One desktop app for Windows and Mac. That perk just got a lot cooler, now that Pandora One 2.0 is out. It adds some features that are pretty essential to a good desktop music player, like easy access to your song history, and a progress bar. I'm not going to ask why it didn't have a progress bar before. Even if you can't skip around within songs in Pandora, it's nice to know how far into a track you are.

It's not flashy, but the most exciting new thing in Pandora 2.0 is the shorter time between songs when you skip or give the thumbs-down. Volume settings are also persistent now, so you get the same volume every time you start the app. And, by the way, Pandora One is an Adobe Air app, so it'll run on Mac and Windows.

[via Mashable]

A few months ago web-based music search engine and streaming media service SeeqPod dropped a hint that the company was working with Microsoft on... something. Now UK paper Telegraph is reporting that Microsoft is planning to launch a streaming music service similar to Spotify, Pandora, or Last.fm.

Microsoft could launch the service by the end of July. Users would be able to either stream songs for free over the internet or download tracks. The service will reportedly be ad-supported, but users will also have the option of paying £9.99 (about $16.30) per month for an ad-free version.

There's also a chance (I'd say a pretty good one), that the music service will be available to Xbox 360 users as well, as Microsoft continues to position the console as a multimedia hub and not just a gaming system.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

There's been a lot of news about the stalled negotiations between online radio providers, artists and record labels, but that seems to have come to an end, and at least one online music site is very happy about it. Pandora, a popular music player and recommendation service, was at the top of the list of possible casualties in the royalty battle, but thanks to the new agreement - which requires Pandora to pay out 25% of its U.S. revenue to SoundExchange in exchange for a whopping 40-50% reduction in royalty rates. According to the company, this means a fighting change to turn a profit in the near future.

The effect on listeners is going to be fairly small. If you listen to over 40 hours a month of Pandora, there'll be a 99 cent charge that buys you unlimited listening for the month.If you're a Pandora One subscriber, you still get unlimited listening with no new charges. This agreement is in place until 2015. Other "pure play" music services like Pandora will be operating under the same deal, but there are carve-outs for small webcasters.

[via TechCrunch]

Since pundits started speculating last year that expensive royalty fees for streaming music would kill Pandora, it seems the company has consistently rolled out more creative, money-making features.

Now premium subscribers can get access to better stream quality, the new Pandora One desktop app, and an ad-free experience for $36/year. That fee will also get rid of one of the most annoying restraints on the free version of Pandora, the limit of 12 skips per day.

Pandora One looks like a pretty cool app, with a mini version of the player to save screen real estate, and 8 different skins to choose from. It also doesn't require you to interact with it as often as the free version does to keep the music going. Instead, you only have to click over once every five hours.

All of this sounds like a pretty good deal for what comes out to be about $3/mo, but it's not clear how far it will go toward keeping Pandora up and running.

Internet radio stations Pandora and Last.fm have been in the news a lot over the last year for removing features - like the ability for users in most of the world to listen to free music streams. So it's nice to see Pandora launch a raft of new features, even if they're only available to users in the US.

At the top of the list of new features is support for lyrics. Pandora has partnered with Gracenote to provide lyrics for some songs. To see if lyrics are available, click the "About This Music" tab and then select lyrics. You'll see the first few lines and a link to click for the full set of lyrics, which will open in another browser window.

Honestly, I tried listening to about a dozen songs this morning and Pandora only managed to find lyrics for two. So this feature is clearly still a work in progress. But it definitely shows promise.

Pandora has also added a new "gift" option that lets you create a custom station by selecting up to 5 artists and songs and sending it to a friend with a message. It's sort of like a somewhat randomized mix-tape.

For the last decade or so people have been talking about how eventually the TV screen and computer monitor will merge. Over the last year or two, we've actually started to see that happen. More and more people are watching TV on their computers either using TV tuner cards or internet video from sites like Hulu. And computer apps like Boxee and set top boxes like Vudu are making it easier for people to watch internet content on their televisions.

Today both Boxee and Vudu announced new services. Vudu is partnering with internet radio station Pandora to allow users to stream personalized music stations over their TV/home entertainment system. And Boxee has launched an application for the iPhone that lets users turn their phone into a remote control for Boxee.

The Boxee iPhone Remote is available in the Boxee App Box, which was launched a few weeks ago. Boxee has been in the news a lot lately due to the company's battle with Hulu. After a bit of back and forth over whether Boxee users should be able to watch Hulu videos using the full screen Boxee browser for the TV (instead of visiting Hulu's web site using a computer), the folks at Boxee seem to be focusing on building a larger community of developers and applications around their platform. This weekend Boxee also announced support for Blip.tv content through a plugin available at the Boxee App Box.

Web based music streaming service Pandora has begun streaming something in addition to music: ads.

Now, you might not notice the ads at first. They're only about 15 seconds long, not every user will be hearing them right away, and Pandora CEO Tim Westergren says the average user will only hear about one ad every two hours. But the move does represent a potential new revenue stream for Pandora, which like other internet broadcasters is facing rising royalty rates for streaming music in the US.

This isn't the first time the company tried streaming audio ads in addition to the display ads that show up on the Pandora web page. Back in 2007 Pandora tried a similar experiment, but decided to cancel it due to negative feedback from users.

What do you think? Are you willing to put up with 15 seconds of advertising for 2 hours of free music? Or do you think this is a slippery slope toward 20 minutes of advertising every hour? Would you rather pay $36 a year for an ad-free service?

[via Gizmodo]

There are plenty of ways to find music that meets your tastes on the internet. Last.fm, Pandora, and similar music discovery services will recommend new music for you based on the songs you like. YouTube is filled with music videos from popular and not so popular artists. And music search engines like SeeqPod make it easy to find songs and videos.

Now if you take all of those music discovery methods and roll them into a ball and add about half a dozen other ways to search for, browse, and find music, you'll have Soundflavor.

We first looked at Soundflavor two years ago, but the service has come a long way since then. Here are just a few of the things you can do with the web-based music discovery service:

• Find and play YouTube videos from artists by searching.
• Browse for music by genre, decade, mood, or subject matter of the lyrics.
• Enter an artist or song name to generate a playlist of YouTube videos of similar songs.
• Embed the Soundflavor Video Jukebox widget on your social networking profile or blog.

Because the music comes from YouTube you will occassionally get a clip of some kid sitting in his or her bedroom with an acoustic guitar, but for the most part the music recommendation engine is pretty good. And hey, some of those kids with guitars are halfway decent.

Last month I wrote about mufin.com's music discovery engine. Unlike traditional music discovery services like last.fm or the Genius Mode in iTunes 8, mufin analyzes the actual musical structure of a song. This is great for music lovers because it can really open up more opportunities to discover new bands.

Co-developed at the Fraunhofer Institute (the creators of the MP3 format), mufin uses audio recognition technology to analyze the actual musical characteristics of a song. Mufin creates a unique "fingerprint" for each song, using 40 characteristics like tempo, instruments, rhythm structure and sound density. Then, when you search for a song in mufin's database, an alogrithm compares the fingerprint of that song against the database and presents you with results of songs that are similar in structure.

Today, mufin is officially entering public beta. If you missed out on the private beta, you can now sign up for the service and give it a whirl. Even better, mufin's public beta now supports both Facebook and iTunes.

Mufin for Facebook is pretty similar to the existing mufin widget for MySpace. You have access to the mufin discovery engine and song catalog from within Facebook and you can add your discoveries to your profile or share them with friends.

As a music lover, one of my favorite innovations of the last five years or so has come in the form of music discovery services. Services like Last.fm, Pandora, Rhapsody and iTunes 8 have made it easy to find artists or songs that are similar to your musical tastes and preferences. The only problem with these services, is that they are based on limited databases (like the iTunes Music Store, for iTunes's Genius Mode), reviews or ratings by other users and overall popularity. That means that the music discovered might indeed be similar, but it really limits results to mainsream songs and generic genre distinctions. This is great for an automatic playlist, but not so great for really finding new bands or artists.

This is why Mufin's new music discovery engine is so unique; it analyzes the actual structure of the song, not just the genre meta-data. Mufin's discovery engine just entered private beta, but Download Squad readers can get in on the action by using this invite link: http://beta.mufin.com/start?ic=e75eecf85a4a547ca9379d6f8b6c23bb.

Co-developed at the Fraunhofer Institute (the creators of the MP3 format), Mufin uses audio recognition technology to analyze the actual musical characteristics of a song. Mufin creates a unique "fingerprint" for each song, using 40 characteristics like tempo, instruments, rhythm structure and sound density. Then, when you search for a song in Mufin's database, an alogrithm compares the fingerprint of that song against the database and presents you with results of songs that are similar in structure.

Remember how last year there was a big to do about the future of internet radio? The US Copyright Royalty Board imposed new, higher fees for online broadcasters, and web radio services like Pandora and Last.fm complained that the new fees would effectively put them out of business. A bill was introduced in Congress to work things out, but that never really went anywhere. But now, a year and a half later, the Digital Media Association, which represents a number of online music distributors, announced an agreement with copyright holders. It just doesn't exactly cover internet radio.

Here's the deal. If you're a company that provides limited music downloads or interactive streaming audio, you have to pay 10.5% of your revenue in royalties, less any amount owed for performance royalties. That covers subscription based services like Rhapsody which let you download music to your PC, so long as the music becomes useless when you stop paying up. It also covers interactive sites like Last.fm which let you select the songs you want to play.

What it doesn't cover are internet radio sites like Pandora or Radio Paradise which provide a stream of music for you selected by a human being (not yourself) or a computer algorithm. No agreement has been reached yet to cover these services.

The good news is that if the parties involved were able to work out a reasonable deal for certain types of online music services, there's hope that Pandora and other online radio companies can be saved... eventually.

[via Techmeme]

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. While using a proxy server might violate the usage license of your ISP or the site you are using, it is as far as I know, not illegal. Still, if you are cautious or in doubt, check with a real lawyer or just refrain from using this type of tool.

For anyone who lives outside the US (or is a US citizen but goes outside the country for vacation), one of the more frustrating aspects of most of the TV streaming services I wrote about earlier is that they are restricted to users accessing the site from the United States. On the flip-side, the BBC's iPlayer is restricted to UK users only, because the BBC is funded by the British public.

OK, fine, I understand the BBC position. If I paid taxes to sponsor the programming, I might be miffed if the rest of the world had free access too. But what if you are a UK resident who happens to go on holiday to another part of Europe? Should you really have to miss "EastEnders?" I say, "no."

So, how do you access sites restricted by location? The same way savvy Chinese users can break pas the Great Firewall of China: proxy servers.