If you’ve been paying any attention to music biz news this week, you’ve no doubt stumbled across an item (or ten) about Google OneBox — the web search company’s bold foray into the world of on-demand music. While many of the reports focus on what this new service means for fans hungry to hear tunes with one-click, they don’t often drill down into what this might mean for artists and songwriters.

OneBox has already launched, so you could just go try it out right now. Or, you could read what our vigorous research revealed about the new venture. OK, it wasn’t really that vigorous — we simply entered a band into the Google search bar to see what happened next.

Being that it’s so close to Halloween, we figured we’d search for Slayer’s classic thrash album, Reign in Blood. Lo and behold, a handful of track titles popped up, with a little “play” icon next to each. We clicked on the title track and were instantly slammed by axe aggression. Neat! read more

You might have run across the handful of articles in the last day or so about online “predictive” radio service Pandora adding audio ads. This move is no doubt an attempt to develop a sustainable revenue stream for Pandora’s free services (the company also offers yearly ad-free subscriptions for $36).

We at FMC are big Pandora fans, and we know we’re not alone. It’s a good bet that the service’s regular users will continue to support it, largely due to Pandora’s easy-to-use and highly addictive architecture that allows listeners to customize any number of “radio stations” based on their musical preferences. But we’ll have to wait and see. read more

The first panel today "Radio Waves" featured a lively discussion about Internet and satellite radio issues. Given the recent ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board, webcasting rates dominated the discussion with many small webcasters and a couple large ones (Pandora and Live365) saying they would be forced out of business if some kind of compromise on the new rates is not found. Mark Lam, CEO of Live365 — one of the oldest major webcasters — was particularly passionate saying the new rates would eat up 75 percent of his revenues.