Have you tried Pandora? It is an absolutely amazing service that has an uncanny ability to find very similar music, occasionally finding gems from a different genre. They also have tons of small, high quality bands.

The biggest con is that a specific "channel" can start to repeat the same 50 or so songs, but that is easily solved by making a new one.

It is well worth the $36/year for the paid ad-free version, and the adobe air desktop app is lightweight and responsive. Nice bonus: you can have up to 2 or 3 computers streaming music on the same account simultaneously.

Seriously, I cannot emphasize enough how awesome Pandora is.

Windows 7 in the US; YMMV elsewhere.

On Linux and the Mac, the command line Pandora client "pianobar" works really well, and while API updates break it, it's always been mere hours before it was fixed, in my experience.

If you're on a mac and want something in the menubar (or whatever they call the thing on the top), try PandaBar. Very nice, has keybindings, and the dev adds features requested as quickly as Apple will turn around updates through the App Store.

Pandora contracted with Facebook and started showing what my friends were listening to (I had used the same emails in both).

That same day I quit Pandora. At that point in time, they did not even have a mechanism to kill your account, so I had to email the company personally.

I quit my Facebook account not long after.

I refuse to willingly partake in a surveillance society.

Are other people seeing this? I use the web interface all the time, and deliberately avoid services that force Facebook sharing/integration.

It certainly isn't forced, but it is probably enabled by default if there is a facebook account with the same email.

http://help.pandora.com/customer/portal/articles/24775-disco...

I've been using Pandora since before they went public and just love the service. Prefer the old Flash version better than the current one but it is good none-the-less. I noticed Spotify on Facebook and became interested in trying it. Evidently I knew very little about Spotify because I thought it was a web app. Long story short never did try Spotify because I didn't want to download client on every machine that I work on. Pandora is still the best solution to the 1 playlist anywhere problem for me.

Pandora is nice, but I refuse to pay for a service where I have to vpn to the US in order to be able to use it. I'm also not overly impressed with the Android app. --It works, but it's not wonderful.

Pandora on android routinely skips songs half way through for me. Its unusable.

Mog does this now. We recommend based on play history and, if you have Facebook connected, we offer you recommendations based on your Facebook likes, as well as a separate collection of recommendations based on your friend's likes.

We also tell you which friend recommended which album, so you can immediately tell whose tastes are more in line with yours and whose are poo.

Mog blows spotify away. You say "we", so good work!

It appears that I /must/ use Facebook to try out mog with a free account... is this true or is the site just overly convoluted? If it is true, yikes. If it's not true, still yikes.

True for the present time. Was not true in the past.

Based on your comments and looking around the site, I was excited about checking Mog out. Requiring facebook is a deal breaker for me. Why restrict the way users can join?

I can't agree with this strongly enough. Why doesn't Spotify have any kind of recommendations? I'd also love to see iTunes Genius implemented in Spotify, but instead of just using my library for similar songs (like iTunes does) they could pull from the whole catalog.

I don't know the details here, but I do know that Pandora has some patents in this area.

Not only is "Radio" iffy - it doesn't even exist in the iPhone app. On mobile, there's essentially no way to discover new music.

"Discovery," both social and machine-generated, is MUCH better on Rdio. I suspect (but have no proof) that they use Echonest for the latter. There is also a slick Chrome extension that puts the Last.fm "Similar Tracks" under the currently playing song.

I've been using Spotify for 2 weeks now after using Rdio for 6 months and I rather like Spotify's Radio feature a lot. The recommendations I get from it seems no better or worse than Rdio's (for me) but I don't mind it and skipping tracks seems so seamless that I barely notice it. What really sold me on Spotify was Boxee support.

This is the main reason why I am using Rdio now. Their radio functionality is awesome and they now have a free version with no ads. Finding lots of new music through them.

Spotify's "artist radio" is a bit better but it still has a ways to go to displace Pandora. Once it does so (if ever) I'll be upgrading.