ReadWriteWeb

The only reason streaming web music hasn't completely killed all other forms of music distribution is the fact that it's not available when you're traveling across wireless networks - say, in a car. Well hold on to your hats and start canceling your satellite radio subscriptions, Pandora is taking to the road.

In the mid-1980s, Pierre Bellanger launched Skyrock pirate radio station as a continuation of his efforts with the French free radio movement. A community inclusive of a diverse voices and agendas, Skyrock inspired a generation of 18-25-year-olds who had never lent their unscripted opinions to a mass distribution medium. As Skyrock developed an IRC channel and later its own blogging software, the community evolved into what it is today - the third largest social networking site in Europe.

It appears that the time for freemium music services in the US has passed. Earlier this week streaming music site Imeem sold to MySpace for under $10 million dollars while laying off a large number of staff. For a company with all four major record labels signed, more than 15 million uniques a month and well over 5 million tracks in its catalogue, it came as a sobering blow to the industry. While many companies move to a subscription model, 8tracks continues to forge along in what some describe as a convenient loophole. As of this weekend the company is publicly launching its API for Boston's Music Hack Day.

In a few weeks, moviegoers will flock to Philip Seymour Hoffman's latest rock ensemble flick Pirate Radio. A fictional period comedy about an illegal station in the North Sea, the film embodies the same anti-authoritarian sentiments that Gen X and Y audiences have grown to love. Jelli.net, a crowdsourced radio station with a Web-based interface, has found a way to democratize sound waves and captivate that same 18-35-year-old audience. The Bay Area company launched in June, allowing users to access a Digg-like interface and vote up or down real time on FM radio during CBS' Live 105 KITS' Sunday programming. As of this evening, the company has penned a national deal with 450 Triton Digital Media radio stations and a distribution deal with Australian broadcaster Austereo.

Some newspapers scrambling to survive the internet condemn websites like Google News and the Huffington Post. Aggregators, they say, need to pay for the right to point to a newspaper's site. Public radio stations, on the other hand, face competition from the internet as well and are just as competitive between themselves as they are collaborative. Somehow, they've responded differently to new media. There may be no better example of that than an iPhone application built by several large public radio organizations and called Public Radio Player. The team behind the app launched a major new release this morning.

After all that waiting, today should have been a day of rejoicing for SIRIUS XM subscribers. That's because today, the satellite radio company finally launched their much-anticipated iPhone application (iTunes link). However, instead of being pleased, subscribers are sorely disappointed. It seems the app is more notable for what it is lacking than what it offers. What's missing? Only some of Sirius XM's best content: Howard Stern, NFL Play-by-Play, MLB Play-by-Play, and SIRIUS NASCAR Radio.

A new radio system developed in Australia is transforming the vehicles on the street into nodes on a network. The technology, designed by scientists at the University of Southern Australia's Institute for Telecommunications Research, is an application called "Dedicated Short Range Communications" (DSRC). Using a combination of GPS and Wi-Fi, cars can communicate their location data to a central office, but it also enables them to communicate with each other.

The Creative Commons Foundation announced today that award winning TV and radio news show Democracy Now! will now be distributed under a CC license. Democracy Now! is broadcast daily on more than 700 television and radio stations around the US and as a podcast online.

Whether you agree with the show's political perspective or not, Democracy Now! is undeniably one of the best produced and distributed independent media projects in the world right now. If there are more high profile collections of media distributed under the innovative Creative Commons License, we don't know what they are. Creative Commons is a variation on traditional copyright that switches permission to republish content to opt-out with publisher applied conditions.