Former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta will take the CEO job at a music discovery site called Playlist, a move that had been speculated last week, after he did not end up taking another position as head of MySpace Music.

Van Natta’s arrival at Playlist was not the only news for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up–former AOL exec Bob Pittman’s Pilot Investment Group is also investing an undisclosed amount of money in Playlist, and Pittman will join its board.

The site, which has been called Project Playlist, had previously raised several million dollars. The new round of funding super-sized that, sources said, hovering at about $18 million.

“Discovery around music is exploding on the Internet,” said Van Natta to BoomTown, in an interview this afternoon, giving it as his main reason for joining Playlist.

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This week, it will be Yahoo stepping up the volume in the debate over the controversial Yahoo-Google ad outsourcing deal.

And it could not come a minute too soon.

Yahoo has been unusually quiet about the issue, after weeks of Google’s more aggressive and listen-to-us-big-brains approach.

That’s all resulted in more Justice Department scrutiny, more critics piling on, including the typically dulcet Canadians, who might also be launching an antitrust investigation.

Thank goodness, then, that the first foray by Yahoo President Sue Decker makes the case in a much more sensible and straightforward manner, which has been sorely needed on the Yahoogle side.

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