Attention All Audiophiles
If you haven't heard of Pandora, check it out. Presented by the Music Genome Project, Pandora is a streaming radio that tailors itself to your music tastes.
Basically you give it the name of a song or a band and it creates a music station with music that is representative of your choice. You can give songs a thumbs up or a thumbs down to refine the music that is played for you. It goes by individual songs, so even if you give the thumbs down to one song by a particular artist other songs by the same artist could still come up in the play list. You can define up to 100 different stations.
In order to see how good a job it does, I put in Nickleback. Rhapsody classifies Nickleback as post-grunge. I'll take their word for it. I am extremely picky about music in this genre. It has problems with being musically interesting: boring melody lines, elementary chord progression, lame lyrics, etc. There's also the problem that a lot of it just sounds like some damn fool screaming. It also seems this particular genre attracts singers with a quality to their singing that I can only describe as whiny, in other words extremely irritating.
After only giving a handful of thumbs-up and thumbs-downs it's doing a remarkable job of presenting music I like and filtering that which I would call crap. Since I doubt "whiny" is one of the criteria Pandora uses, it still occasionally plays a song that I'm not crazy about, but it's stopped playing music that would have me reaching for the station buttons in the car.
They have partnered with iTunes if you want to buy a digital track and with Amazon if you're more interested in the CD. It's a free service if you don't mind advertising. Advertising is minimal right now. I actually haven't heard a single ad so far, but they promise to ramp that up as they get rolling. Even at $36/year if you want to listen without advertising it's a pretty good deal.