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According to The Leading Question's recent research report, as many as 65% of UK teens are streaming music on a monthly basis. Meanwhile, file-sharing has decreased significantly since the Digital Britain Report consultation to address illicit P2P file sharing. While music sharing sites have come and gone due to funding, legal issues and lack of users, here are some of the streaming sites that continue to thrive.

Microsoft is planning on launching its own streaming music service by the end of July, Emma Barnett reported today in the UK Telegraph. A Microsoft exec told Barnett that the service would likely resemble Spotify, a popular European music startup that combines ad-supported free streaming music with a premium ad-free subscription option and the ability to purchase songs by download. A long list of glowing reviews for Spotify was well rounded-up by Jennifer Guevin at CNet early this year. We suspect there is some chance the service could be built on top of the technology of another music startup, Seeqpod.

Can Microsoft find the right balance of monetizing music without being over-bearing, enabling multi-platform use without being confusing and satisfying millions of mainstream users without being boring? Those seem to be the looming questions.

We have seen our fair share of doom and gloom this year, but, according to a report from Bloomberg.com, at least Pandora, the free online music discovery service, expects to be profitable next year. Pandora was founded in in 2000, and derives its revenue from targeted audio advertising in its music streams and affiliate sales through Amazon's MP3 store and iTunes. In the interview with Bloomberg, Pandora's founder Tim Westergreen also disclosed that the service is currently adding about 50,000 new users a day, and that the service's successful iPhone app is responsible for bringing in about 20,000 of these new users.

Last.fm, the popular online music discovery service, just launched its new Personalized Visual Music player today, which, at least from a visual perspective, takes online radio to a new level. The new player automatically plays a slideshow with related images uploaded by the Last.fm community, which looks surprisingly good. More importantly, though, Last.fm now allows users to create combo stations, where a user can create a station with up to three artists or tags.

Yahoo introduced a new version of its Yahoo Music artist homepages today, which now include links to YouTube videos, Pandora radio stations, Last.fm, and photos from Flickr. Yahoo also plans to open up its API so that others can build applications for Yahoo Music, and, at a later point, artists will be able to create their own customized pages on Yahoo Music as well. Thanks to its drag-and-drop interface, users can easily customize the new artist homepages to their own liking.

The CBS-acquired streaming music service Last.fm announced this morning that it will "soon" require users outside of the US, UK and Germany to pay €3.00 per month to keep the music rolling. In blog comments on the announcement, the company explained that those three countries were the only ones where ad sales were proving successful enough to monetize the free music that way; elsewhere the money will have to come out of listeners' pockets.

It's a dramatic move that could pave the way for other media companies to do the same and effectively open up international markets. People complain, but do you think that viewers would pay a similar monthly fee for international access to Hulu, for example? We do.

For us, the iPhone has already replaced our radio while driving. Thanks to a steady stream of podcasts and the Last.fm and Pandora applications, annoying DJs and endless commercials have become a thing of the past. Now, another streaming music app, Slacker Radio, which was already available for the Blackberry, has arrived in the App Store (iTunes link), and we think it is a worthy competitor to the popular Last.fm and Pandora apps.