Thanks to Apophenia I’ve been playing with Pandora aka the Music Genome Project. Right now it is only for invite and if you’d like an invite just let me know and I can send you one!
Pandora runs on your browser so you don’t have to download or install special software and it doesn’t run on Real Player or anything like that. You can have it open in a full browser or in a small “player browser”.
You create your own stations by entering the name of a particular artist or song and it creates a station made up of music that are “similar”. Some of the stations are right on and others are a little odd. They have a lot of Indie musicians, but no Melissa Ferrick. Oddly enough, they have Suzanne Buirgy.
There are no commercials at all and you can skip songs. There’s a menu for each song that is playing where you can find out why they’ve chosen a particular song for that station. You can also say “I really like this song” or “I don’t really like this song”. If you indicate you don’t like something, they won’t play it on your station again.
I like it better than the Yahoo Launchcast but am still not sure I’ll be willing to pay for it when it becomes a paid service.