The Web interface for the popular music service has been totally overhauled, offering a sleeker, cleaner design with simplified controls. The top of the page contains iTunes-esque controls for playing, pausing and skipping songs, as well as voting them up or down. From the same toolbar, users can type in the name of any artist, composer or song to automatically generate a radio station based on their musical preferences.

Pandora also has new social and sharing features on the way. The service will soon be rolling out a Twitter-style feed of recent music-listening activity from friends to serve as "a centralized place to find, like and comment on what friends and like-minded listeners are discovering and enjoying on Pandora." With this update, stations finally get their own dedicated URL, which makes it easier for users to share stations with each other.

Until today, Pandora had a 40-hour monthly listening cap in place as a way to keep artist royalty payment costs under control. That cap has been lifted, but the service still limits the number of times you can skip songs within a given station, due to licensing restrictions.

We think it's CBS Radio and not Clear Channel which has made the biggest strides. CBS' partnerships with AOL and Yahoo!, along with its ownership of trendy online radio app last.fm, have effectively made CBS Radio the most powerful force in Internet radio in 2008.

Kevin Conroy, executive vice president of AOL, recently wrote in a guest blog post at Radio Business Report about the evolution of AOL Radio. Conroy wrote that the partnership with CBS Radio allowed AOL to tap into the "core competency in traditional radio" that CBS had. At the same time CBS got access to "AOL's substantial online listener base, and allowed it to connect with the AOL Network, which reaches more than 110 million unique visitors a month", wrote Conroy. He also noted that AOL got "an improved player, built by CBS Radio" that works on both PCs and Macs.

At the end of August we published data from comScore about the Internet Radio industry. It showed that the big Internet companies still dominate, specifically AOL Radio and Yahoo Music. At that point AOL Radio had been showing excellent annual growth, with a 56% increase over the past year. However Yahoo Music had decreased 19% annually since July 07. According to Reuters, in October comScore data had AOL at 3.99 million unique visitors, while CBS Web properties had 3.95 million unique visitors and Yahoo! Launchcast had 2.87 million. When you look at who powers both AOL and Yahoo now, it's clear that CBS has significantly increased its market presence since mid-08.

At ReadWriteWeb we've tended to focus on the innovative Web native apps that have risen independently of the big radio stations. According to comScore Pandora rose 89% from July 07 - July 08, while last.fm had 62% annual growth. But both the traditional radio broadcasting and Internet bigcos have been steadily increasing their influence - none moreso than CBS, which in addition to the AOL/Yahoo! partnerships this year also acquired last.fm in May 2007.

And then there's mobile. As Reuters pointed out, the iPhone has had a big influence on radio for mobile devices this year (see our post Top 5 Streaming Music Apps for the iPhone for examples). Other mobile devices, such as Blackberry and the Internet phones from Nokia, are also ramping up.

What other trends have you noticed in 2008 from Internet radio? What do you expect to see happen in 2009?