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A report on Reuters claims that 2008 was a breakthrough year for radio on the Web, with a proliferation of new web and mobile apps for radio. The report states that Clear Channel has "long led the way" with innovative Web programing such as its "Stripped" concert series and "New" artist spotlight program, but also big companies such as CBS and AOL have contributed to the growth in online radio.

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.

Leading online music app last.fm has released its most popular songs, albums and artists of 2008. The rankings come from last.fm's database, based on number of listeners. The music had to be released in 2008 to qualify for the charts.

The Top 10 tracks is absolutely dominated by Coldplay's Viva la Vida, with 6 songs - including numbers 1 and 2. The title track was number 1, with more than three million listens in about 6 months. Coldplay also features at 5, 6, 8 and 9. This is reminiscent of the dominance of the Billboard singles chart the Beatles enjoyed in April 1964!

To complement the poll we ran this week about streaming music sites, we sourced data from comScore about the Internet Radio industry. comScore's data shows that the big Internet companies still dominate, specifically AOL Radio and Yahoo Music. In contrast, our poll - the second annual time that we've run it - shows that last.fm and Pandora are the favorites of our readers.

Is this a case of geek trends being at odds with mainstream? Or is it that the mainstream hasn't yet caught onto the cool music sites? Let's check out and analyze the stats from both comScore and our poll....

Recently, a new Wikipedia mashup came on the scene - WikiFM, this one a mashup of Wikipedia and popular music streaming service Last.fm. The mashup lets you listen to Last.fm via a player loaded in a frame on the right while the Wikipedia page for the artist or band is loaded in the frame on the left. The idea itself is great, but the execution of the mashup leaves a lot to be desired.

Today, Last.fm is announcing some stats on their free streaming radio service and its impact on music sales. Contrary to what the labels would have you believe, it appears that free music is, in fact, good for the industry, leading to increased revenue for Last.fm's partners, like Amazon and iTunes, who are benefiting from January's launch of the site's free on-demand music service.

Today, social music site Last.fm announced that they would be sponsoring a new music category in Mozilla's Extend Firefox 3 contest. The contest, which encourages developers to build add-ons for the Firefox browser, began on March 17th, 2008 and will continue until midnight on July 4th, 2008. This cycle of the contest will reward apps that take advantage of the new features in Firefox 3 as well as those that apps that are updated for Firefox 3, while also showing significant improvements in user experience and performance.

An interesting new online video series, called Open Media Web, debuted today. The first episode is an interview with Yahoo's Lucas Gonze - who created music playlisting service WebJay, acquired by Yahoo! in January 2006. The interview was conducted by Chris Messina and Brian Oberkirch. In it Gonze discusses his thoughts on the Open Media Web, on user-respectful business models and coercive business practices, and business opportunities for open systems and data.