This morning, as I was tuning into last.fm I found two things that cought my attention. First, listening to a radio station now requires that you have a member account and that you are logged in. Not that I didn’t already have one, but being forced to log-in to listen to any random radio station is completely new to me. Then, when the radio started, a second thing hit me.

Yesterday, Lala/MySpace, iLike and Google have officially announced the launch of Google’s music service Onebox — a special kind of Google search results that will let you instantly stream songs directly from Google’s results page by clicking the small play button in your search result. You can either stream the song or buy it. Additionally, Google will also display additional content like tour information and music videos.

Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, angel investors and the former founders of successes like Skype and Kazaa and less successful Joost, are rumored to be behind the new music startup Rdio (www.rdio.com), TechCrunch and the NYTimes reported. So far, the website shows only a logo and a field to add your email to the mailing list.

Yesterday, FT published an status update on British Sky Broadcasting’s (BSkyB) strategic move into the music business. The launch of the new service is scheduled for 19 October 2009, according to Brand Republic. This move doesn’t come by surprise as the Guardian and other news services have written about this move already earlier this year. Read on and vote on our business model poll …

Last week on 9 July, TechCrunch awarded the hottest start-ups in Europe. Spotify, a UK Stockholm-based music startup that lets users listen and share their favorite music, not only won the award for the Best Web Application or Service, but also the awards for the Best Startup Founders and the Best New Startup Summer 2008 to 2009. (Updated)

After a two year battle between webcasters (e.g. Pandora, etc.; see our directory for more webcasters) and the music labels, the parties agreed on new royalty rates for music streaming on Tuesday this week, the New York Times reported. Many of the music sites have argued that the old rates were so high, that they almost forced them to close down operations. This, however, could have come back to haunt the record labels, since these services have proven useful for listeners to discover new music.

Bertelsmann, the German media giant, will found a joint venture with the private equity firm KKR, Frankfurter Allgemeine reported. While Bertelsmann will bring BMG Rights Management as an investment in kind to the table and KKR EUR 250m of cash over the next few years. Additionally, KKR will raise up to EUR 500m of debt from banks to finance acquisitions.

LyricRat a simple app developed by 9astronauts that allows users to send snipplets of song lyrics to @LyricRat. In return, users get a title, an artist, and a link. Sounds like a great little app, but does it really work?