I’m here at Capitol Records in Hollywood, California for a special media event where Lala, MySpace, iLike, Google and others are officially announcing the launch of Google’s Music Onebox — a special new kind of Google search result that will let you instantly stream songs directly from Google’s results page. We first broke the news of the feature’s impending launch last week, though none of the companies involved have been willing to comment on it until now.

Here’s how the new feature will work: Onebox will let users stream songs directly from Google’s search result page, and will also include additional content like tour information and music videos (the actual content shown will vary depending on the partner — more on that later). Enter a query for “Use Somebody”, and you’re going to see a small ‘play’ button in your search result that lets you stream the Kings of Leon song in its entirety, or buy the song. Clicking on the play button will bring up a small browser window that will immediately start streaming your song.

Currently, if you want to share a Pandora station or song with a friend, you have to email it to them. Last time I checked, this isn’t 1994. Tonight, Pandora is joining the 21st century with the addition of simple ways to share stations and songs on Twitter and Facebook. And it’s further emphasizing a feature that no one seems to realize exists: Gifting Pandora stations.

On Pandora’s main playback pages you will now see a new set of buttons next to the traditional playback ones. These include a Twitter button, a Facebook button, a mail button, and a gift button. Clicking on any of those allows you to send the current station or current song you’re listening to via those respective services.

A large number of web services are geographically restricted, such as Hulu, Pandora and Spotify. The reasons are usually to do with content licensing restrictions, or because US visitors (or visitors from other advanced economies) are of a higher value from a monetization perspective. A web application can only guess at the location of a visitor based on an IP address and other information, such as browser language and regional settings.

IP addresses are mapped to countries (and in some instances, further to states and cities) using large commercial datasets such as GeoIP from Maxmind, which is a ‘best guess’ database based on data it has collected (how, I would rather not know). The system is accurate enough to enable services to block on a country level, but often fail at a more local level.

“I need Android like I need a hole in the head.” – Tom Conrad, Pandora CTO

Popular music service Pandora is a huge hit on the iPhone, and they were one of the first Palm Pre apps available as well. But when it comes to Android, the company has at best always been “meh.”

In July 2008 Pandora CTO Tom Conrad said “I need Android like I need a hole in the head,” adding “the last thing from a technology standpoint that i need is another OS platform that sits on top of buggy firmware.” The relevant video clip is here (skip to the 55 second mark).

“We’re going to put your face next to that quote when you launch an Android app,” I said at the time (check!). Conrad later clarified his position.

Anyway, back to reality, Pandora has now launched an Android application, and it’s pretty darn cool. Unlike the new Facebook for Android, it doesn’t skimp on features. In fact, it’s the first mobile Pandora application that integrates with the built in music player so that you can create stations from the artists and songs in your local collection. It also integrates with the Android home screen widget system.

An enraged reader, Josh Vickers, writes in today to complain about Slacker’s premium online radio service. Like Pandora, Slacker streams music to users for free. And like Pandora, Slacker limits the number of times you can skip songs each hour, and has advertising.

Both services allow users to remove those limitations if they pay a yearly fee. Slacker charges $48/year. Pandora charges $36/year for their Pandora One service.

The frustration from users isn’t that Slacker charges more. It’s how they market the premium product. Pandora straight up says they’ll charge you $36 to upgrade. No misleading marketing statements. You pay $36 and you get Pandora One for a year.

But Slacker tricks you. They give you a seven day free trial and say it’s $3.99 a month after that. But you get billed for the whole year – $48 – after that seven day period is over. And if you don’t want want to pay for that year, you have to cancel during the seven day period.

I’m a Web fanatic, I admit. But you probably already knew that… My work environment has been completely web based for years now. The same applies to my music. Like many people, I used to download music from Kazaa or eMule (Yeah, I know some of you still do). Most of the time now, I listen to music on the web and don’t have any need to download it. My laptop benefits the most from this inclination since it’s not weighed down by music files, thus saving me tons of space and virus headaches (you eMule users know what I’m talking about). Anyhow, if I do choose to download music, I can always do it over at iTunes or my favorite place in the web: Jamendo.

Music plays a large role in our lives. Since the web now plays an even bigger part, combining the two together has become unavoidable. The greatest thing about this powerful duo is that you don’t need to spend a lot of time searching for music you like — just use this nifty guide list and you’ll find just about everything you need to enjoy hours of good music. The sound quality changes from service to service, but overall, it’s good enough for regular web usage.

After years of uncertainty and talk of shutting down, Internet streaming radio finally got the break it needed a few weeks ago. SoundExchange, the group responsible for setting the listening rates being charged to the Internet radio services, agreed to cut its proposed rate hikes in exchange for trade-offs such as a higher guaranteed rate. The most visible company affected by this Pandora, but it’s hardly the only one. One company we spoke to, Wowza Media, tells us it started seeing a jump in interest in its Flash-based streaming solution for content providers in anticipation of such a deal.

Technically, Wowza is a Flash media server company. That means that it competes with the likes of Adobe and Microsoft to offer up streaming media solutions for all types on content, including streaming Internet radio. While the company has long seen success in this field outside of the U.S., where the royalty rates aren’t as imposing, it was a tough sell in the U.S. with the rates being proposed. But with the new deal in place, the company sees a whole new range of possibilities.

MG Siegler and I ran into Pandora CTO Tom Conrad on Saturday evening at dinner gathering in San Francisco. He was still glowing from all the good news at his once troubled startup: a reasonable settlement around online streaming royalty rates quickly followed by a healthy round of funding that should take the company to profitability sometime next year.

We waited patiently until Conrad was 3-4 cocktails in and then pounced, dragged him outside and stuck a camera in his face. The result is below.

Clearly Conrad was still too sober to tell us all the juicy details. But he did once again confirm the funding and he gave some updated Pandora user stats – 30 million registered users, 12 million monthly uniques and 7-8 million iPhone app installations (plus 2 million more on Blackberry).

With its potential troubles behind it, having reached a deal to stream music while staying afloat financially, it looks like Pandora is getting flush with cash. The Internet streaming radio service has raised a new $35 million round of funding, multiple sources told peHUB earlier, and we’ve just confirmed the round with the company.

Pandora is being mum on the huge number, but is saying that Greylock Partners led the round and that Greylock partner David Sze will be joining Pandora’s board. Greylock joins existing investors Crosslink Capital, Walden Venture Capital, Labrador Ventures, King Street Capital, Hearst Corporation, DBL Investors, and Selby Ventures in the funding.

After two years of uncertainty, Pandora’s future has finally been secured.

For those not familiar with what was going on, basically the streaming rates for Internet radio were in danger of being raised to levels that would have made it very hard for companies like Pandora to stay afloat. But a resolution has been reached between webcasters, artists, and record labels, Pandora CTO Tom Conrad tells us.

“Pandora is finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates,” Conrad says.

Imeem has a great Android app. In fact, it’s still one of the few very good apps available on that platform as it continues to find its legs. It’s so good that we gave it a Crunchie this year. But as good as it is, it took the application coming to the iPhone platform to push the company past a big milestone: 1 million mobile platform installs.

Imeem Mobile for the iPhone, which we were the first to report on back in May right before it launched, already accounts for 1/3 of Imeem’s mobile users, we’re told. It’s been consistently in the top 5 music apps and near the top 50 overall in the App Store since then. But does that mean that it’s better than the Android version? No, in fact, it’s worse for one reason: It can’t run in the background.

Most TechCrunch writers are iPhone users. And while we’re still debating whether when what time we will be upgrading to the iPhone 3G S next Friday, we are excited for the iPhone OS 3.0 next Wednesday. We’ve had a few requests to publish the apps we use on our iPhones – and we’re going to share that information with you now.

The following list is by no means all of the apps we have on our iPhones. There are plenty of apps we only use a couple times a month (e.g. Shazam), but when we need them, they’re great. We’ve also linked to any TechCrunch/CrunchGear/MobileCrunch reviews of the apps. Let us know which apps you use in the comments below.

Pandora had the top downloaded iPhone app for all of last year, and it continues to be a big success for the company, even helping them make some money. Now there’s another avenue to potentially do that with personalized concert listings within the app thanks to a partnership with SonicLiving.

The feature, which is already live on the web, shows you concerts you might like based on music you have rated, bookmarked or stations you’ve created on Pandora in the past. It shows you these concerts based on your location. But there’s a catch. It’s not actually a part of the Pandora app itself, but rather is an advertisement, sponsored by Amstel Light, you can click on to be taken to the personalized listing of concerts. From there you can buy tickets to shows.

The tech world is an interesting one when it comes to companies making money. Some at the top like Microsoft, Apple and Google are raking in billions in profits every year. And each of those do it with different models: Microsoft through software, Apple through hardware and Google through advertising. But at the other end of the spectrum, most startups, even the very popular ones, haven’t yet figured out how to make money beyond their costs.

While the advertising-based model is working for a select few, for most, it’s simply not proving to be a very good stand-alone model. Pandora is one of the companies that web-based advertising is actually working pretty well for. But even they’re not expecting to turn a profit until next year — and that’s based on projections. I bring them up because they recently decided to move forward with a freemium model in a serious way for the first time last week. As a large service with a rabid fan-base, this seems like a brilliant move. And I wonder if the time isn’t right for more services to try this?

You’d be hard pressed to find someone who tries the online streaming radio service Pandora that doesn’t like it. In fact, some users like it so much that they actually ask for ways to pay the company, to make sure it stays alive (something that has been a question mark given the oppressive Internet radio licensing costs). And while there has been a limited subscription version for some time, Pandora has never proactively promoted it. But starting tomorrow it’s taking the freemium model seriously, with the launch of Pandora One.

The most obvious feature of Pandora One is the removal of ads from the site (this was the only feature of the previous subscription version) — that means not only the ads on the page but the in-stream audio ads as well. And there are five other keys to Pandora One that you get with your $36-a-year subscription price: The biggest one is access to a very solid Pandora desktop app. The others include high quality streaming, a personalized look, a mini player and extended player timeouts.

Easily my favorite app on the Android platform is Imeem. It’s simple, fast and powerful, allowing you to listen to a huge range of music for free. And now it’s coming to the iPhone, we’ve learned.

The Imeem app has already been submitted for App Store approval and could be released any day, we’re hearing from a reliable source. In terms of what it will offer, you can probably expect it to be about the same as the Android version. That means access to Imeem’s library of music and perhaps more importantly, access to your own collection of songs from the cloud, if you use Imeem’s MyMusic service to put your music on their servers.

Pandora is a company that mainly makes its money through advertising deals on its streaming Internet radio service. But a growing portion of the business is also affiliate downloads of songs that users hear on Pandora and want to buy on either iTunes or Amazon’s MP3 service. And the biggest mover accelerating growth in that regard are downloads taking place on the iPhone.

Users are buying about a million songs a month now from these affiliate links on Pandora, CTO Tom Conrad tells me. Of those, a solid 20% are coming directly from Pandora’s iPhone app, which includes an easy link to open the iPhone’s iTunes app, and buy a track. That’s really impressive considering that it’s just one phone that a relatively small percentage of their users use.

Letting people know what music you are listening to has long been a staple of the web. The blogging platform LiveJournal has long had the “listening to” field, instant messaging clients like iChat and Google Talk added the ability to update your status based on the song you were listening to a few years ago, and now people are using Twitter to send our their music selections. Blip.fm is the best for this so far, but a new challenger rises in Dora.

Dora is actually an API mashup of three popular web services: the music streaming service Pandora, the micro-messaging service Twitter and the URL-shortening service Bit.ly. When you load Dora, you may think it’s just Pandora, but at the bottom of the page is the Dora overlay which provides you with an easy way to tweet out what you’re listening to. Before you do this, you must authenticate yourself on Twitter, but that gives you the ability to send a tweet out with the title of the song you are listening to (and a message in the remaining characters) with one click. There is also an option to append a link to the song shortened using Bit.ly.

One of the reasons that Internet music streaming services Pandora, imeem and Last.fm have been able to build large audiences is because they are run by people who have a passion for music. Or should I say, a passion for music beyond pop music. With Goom Radio, I’m not so sure.

Not only is Goom clearly trying to play the popular music card with a website littered with the likes of Coldplay, Kanye West, Beyonce and Britney Spears, but it promises to have “passionate programmers” and DJs. I don’t know about you, but I had two core reasons that I stopped listening to tradtional radtio long ago: Crap music, and DJs. Goom, apparently, sees those as strong suits.

Free entertainment hub Boxee keeps on getting better and better. A couple of hours ago, the venture-backed startup released a full API that allows developers to build applications for the open-source platform using a set of API calls in Python and writing the GUI using XML. At the same time, the company is laying the groundwork for a richer App Box, which it refers to as an open application store where they are not the gatekeeper (like Apple for its iPhone App Store) but rather a facilitator.

Heck, they’re even prepared to act as middleman for connecting freelance web developers with companies looking to leverage their API. Hard not to love that type of company.

Boxee is today also introducing a new test version of the Boxee alpha version for Mac and Apple TV (get it here for Intel Mac OS X 10.4+), adding two applications that were built using the brand new API. The new Boxee alpha comes with a lot of music goodness as it includes both Pandora, the popular music streaming service, and RadioTime, which enables their users to access over 100,000 traditional radio stations from across the globe.