July 7 - 5:20pm EDT   Owners of Internet radio stations and music label groups struck a deal on Tuesday that should allow online outlets to continue streaming music. The agreement is now a scaling one and will ask larger stations to pay either 25 percent of their revenue or a per-track rate based on the year, ranging from 0.08 cents per song in 2006 through to 0.14 cents per song in 2015, depending on whichever is greater. Those companies that make less than $1.25 million per year will be asked to pay between 12 and 14 percent of their revenues. [full story]

July 3 - 12:20pm EDT   imeem is gradually building its own music store that may afford it independence from Apple's iTunes or Amazon MP3, an investigation has found. Normally, those buying permanent copies of music from the site must go through an Amazon or iTunes link and buy it off-site; quietly, however, the company has been adding direct-download MP3 purchases of its own for certain artists, such as Iron and Wine. The payment system is direct and uses either credit cards or PayPal. [full story]

June 23 - 3:05pm EDT   The Splashtop instant-on platform from DeviceVM is coming to Sony's VAIO NW-series notebook PCs and Acer's AspireRevo nettop PCs, as per a pair of Tuesday launches. Sony's implementation of the platform is called Quick Web Access, while Acer calls its RevoBoot. In either case, Splashtop, which could be described as a lightweight Linux operating system, allows users to access the Internet within a few seconds but without having to boot the full operating system. [full story]

May 20 - 4:50pm EDT   Ford and Microsoft, which have jointly developed the SYNC communications and entertainment system for various Ford vehicles, may soon get streaming Internet radio capabilities via a partnership with Internet radio provider Pandora. A representative from Ford's Design and Technology team, Charlotte Fisher, has promised SYNC will receive regular updates sometime between every six and twelve months and has confirmed that Ford is currently engaged in talks with Pandora. [full story]

April 6 - 2:10pm EDT   Yahoo today unveiled a reworked, public beta version of Yahoo Music that significantly changes the company's philosophy on content. The new version serves as a central hub for third-party music services and will let users buy songs from a number of sources, including Amazon and iTunes. It likewise collects Internet radio streams from Last.fm and Pandora as well as music videos on YouTube. [full story]

April 2 - 2:25am EDT   Palm today took aggressive steps to expand support for the webOS by adding legacy support, Internet sync, a larger developer program and new third-party apps it says showcase the new mobile platform. The company has revealed that outside firm MotionApps has developed a utility known as Classic that emulates support for PalmOS software. Like its rough equivalent in Apple's Mac OS X, it creates a virtual environment that works with "most" apps; the change to a full touchscreen OS requires that MotionApps put in simulated buttons. It should launch at the same time as the Pre, which should ship to Sprint in late spring. [full story]

March 17 - 11:10am EDT   Music from iTunes and other download stores now makes up exactly one third of all music sold in the US, according to NPD Group findings. The jump comes after the number of buyers climbed from 28 million in 2007 to 36 million in 2008 and these new shoppers bought more tracks. By contrast, CD sales have continued to plummet and saw about 17 million Americans stop buying CDs altogether in 2008, resulting in a drop for CD sales of about 19 percent. [full story]

March 16 - 4:20pm EDT   VUDU has recently announced it has added support for the recommendation-based Internet radio service Pandora. The feature is the first music application available on the VUDU Box and allows on-screen access to the multitude of channels. Multiple user accounts are supported, so each member of the family can log in and access their own favorite presets. [full story]

December 31 - 1:00pm EST   TIME has published a list of its ten favorite App Store downloads. Pandora Radio ranked highest and was considered "the all-time best free app for music lovers." The streaming music service also scored the top position in Apple's overall comparison of free apps. Users can enter an artist, song, album or genre, and Pandora then creates a station that provides similar music from a wide range of content. [full story]

October 7 - 10:20am EDT   Chumby today added support for a new set of features on its namesake customizable Internet media device. The updates are headlined by the addition of Pandora's radio streams; users can now listen to their personal Internet music feeds on the device and flag songs as they would on a computer or cellphone to favorite certain music styles or exclude others. Pandora can also be used as the default alarm along with other usual sources. Using the new stream on the Chumby is free. [full story]

August 28 - 12:20pm EDT   Logitech on Thursday turned its attention to wireless audio courtesy of both a wholly independent Internet radio and speakers built just for notebooks. One of the first fruits of Logitech's buyout of Squeezebox, the Squeezebox Boom can pull and play unprotected music from any recent Mac or Windows PC on a local 802.11g Wi-Fi network but also picks up Internet streaming radio services entirely on its own, including largely free services such as Last.FM, Pandora or Slacker as well as a user's memberships to primarily for-pay services such as Rhapsody and Sirius' Internet streams. [full story]

August 5 - 11:25am EDT   In addition to new software, Sonos today overhauled its ZonePlayer music streaming hubs with two new models that should both be more useful across more areas. Both the high-end ZP120 and simpler ZP90 are the first to use the company's in-house SonosNet 2.0 network. The standard uses the same multiple-in, multiple-out (MIMO) antenna technology as 802.11n Wi-Fi to roughly double the range of the device's mesh network and thus let users tap into music from the Internet and local network from a greater distance in a given home. The network is also encrypted in AES and is backwards-compatible with earlier ZonePlayers. [full story]

July 29 - 4:40pm EDT   Internet radio provider Pandora and personal peripheral maker Logitech on Tuesday announced a partnership that will give owners of Logitech's wireless music systems, including the Squeezebox and Squeezebox Duet, as well as the Transporter, free access to Pandora's service. The arrangement is the first to offer the Internet service at no charge, but later this fall will expose users to advertising that will essentially pay for the subscriptions. [full story]