I looked at both Pandora and Last.fm. I confess I decided to start with Pandora because I liked its name, but on the other hand, Last.fm doesn't make you create an account to just try it out (after this many Things, I'm getting burned out on creating accounts and keeping track of passwords). One advantage of either of these services over broadcast radio? Well, remember the frustration of, "Wow, I really like this song, but I've never caught who sings it or what the title is"? Not a problem with Internet radio, where you can read all about the song, the album, and the artist while the song plays. I was able to bookmark a group I'd never heard of before, who happened to come up because they're similar to a group I'd told Pandora I liked--fun!
While I've had iTunes on my computer for about two years now, I'd never bothered to look at its "Radio" option. There wasn't much point, what with only having a dial-up connection. But having just gotten high-speed Internet (!), it was a good time to be reminded of that option. I looked it over a bit. Admittedly, after all the graphics of Pandora and Last.fm, iTunes looked very barebones in this regard, but they certainly had a lot of stations to choose from. But several of them were dead silent when I clicked on them. I don't know if the station was permanently dead (how often does Apple review these lists?) or just not broadcasting at that time. If the latter, it reminded me of TV stations in my childhood and how they would just go off the air every night.
Here's an album quilt widget from Last.fm. I finally have a name for the genre of music I've been listening to lately: medieval. So that's something else I learned from this Thing.
