Two announcements this week show how some of those silly MySpace widgets and annoying Facebook applications are becoming real businesses.

First, the rock band R.E.M. is going to release its latest album Accelerate through iLike, streaming the entire album across iLike’s Facebook, Hi5 and Bebo applications and its other services. It is the first time that a band this large has released an album through iLike.

Second, widget service provider Gydget has struck a deal with indie music marketer and distributor The Orchard, to distribute music through widgets on MySpace and other social networks.

R.E.M. is working with iLike because the Seattle-based company has sewn together its many properties into a service for musicians that it calls a “universal artist dashboard” (our coverage). This dashboard is proving useful for major acts, like R.E.M., because they can publish a new album, a demo song clip, a video, a concert schedule or other information on social sites and music services across the web.

Here’s how: ILike quickly became the dominant music-related service on Facebook, after the social network’s developer platform launched last May (our coverage). Its applications let you play a music quiz game, put clips of your favorite songs on your profile page, and see when your favorite bands are playing near you. More recently, it has expanded to rival social networks with developer platforms, Bebo and Hi5 (our coverage). It also offers desktop plugins for iTunes and Windows Media Player (here), as well as its free-standing site and an iPhone application. Applications for Orkut and MySpace are slated to launch soon.

The dashboard is now used by more than 200,000 musicians, and around half of the top 500 musical acts in the country, including Radiohead, Jewel, Linkin Park, and others, the company claims. Its dashboard reaches 23 million users, total.

U2, for example, published an original song through the dashboard earlier this year, and gained 300,000 new fans — and 10,000 new fan comments — within a week.

R.E.M. has a slightly more complex plan in store for iLike. Essentially, it is streaming its album across iLike properties, but not letting users download it. The band start streaming the album on March 24, a week before the album itself goes on sale in North America. ILike is letting fans pre-order it on iTunes and Amazon’s music store. R.E.M. will also broadcast an exclusive video message about the album, that it will distribute via iLike.

Note: In case you’re wondering how Facebook’s own music efforts (our coverage) might compete with iLike, iLike’s chief executive Ali Partovi tells me that he’s not staying awake thinking about it. He points out the Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly went out of his way at the South by Southwest conference to mention iLike and how it’s doing a great job. Also, Facebook’s own fan page for R.E.M.has nearly 2,000 users, while iLike’s R.E.M. page has more than 300,000.

Another note: In case you’re wondering how iLike might work with MySpace, which itself got its start through being a social network for musicians and their fans, Partovi says that the relationship will be symbiotic. The company is experimenting with linking musician’s fan pages on other applications to their MySpace pages, as opposed to creating iLike fan pages within MySpace and linking to those. ILike will also release applications on MySpace, such as its music quiz application. But Partovi concedes that MySpace is a more competitive environment overall than the other social networks, with a range of third parties already running music-related applications, such as Imeem and its MySpace