free mp3's on your mp3 player in car>pandora
I use Pandora, Grooveshark and Last.FM where appropriate -
Last.FM has more mainstream stuff and their recommendation engine is based more on genre than actual musical characteristics. This makes for a more varied listening experience in terms of sound/style, but their library means I'm less likely to hear something I've never heard of. I use last.fm when I want "radio" that I can sing along to.
Pandora is pretty much the opposite of last.fm. Recommendations based on musical characteristics sometimes results in a monotonous experience, but I have learned about far more new bands/artists from Pandora than last.fm. I use Pandora when I don't want the music to be a distraction. When something catches me I bookmark it and go back to what I was doing.
I use Grooveshark when I want to be able to cherry-pick the songs/artists I hear.
I love Pandora in the car. Beats the hell out of regular radio and sounds way better, too. I also play it at home when I'm doing housework or washing the cars.
how do you get pandora in the car?
phone -> adapter -> head unit
pretty epic on my iphone
satellite radio anywhere for free.
Solution to monotonous experience: add a variety of artists to your station. i.e. (these aren't on my station) - Barry Manilow, Doors, AC/DC, The Supremes. You won't get a monotonous experience. Plus, that might be what screws other people up. Next, GenX will be posting "AC/DC and Barry Manilow comes on??!"
I dunno, there's some distinctly odd seemingly non-randomness to what they/it picks. I've got the Who as one of my 10 seed artists, and if a Who song plays, there will be a Beatles and a Rolling Stones song within the previous or following 4-5 tracks. Yesterday, I got the same U2 song twice (2 different live versions) within about 10 tracks, and U2 isn't one of the bands on my list. ISIS is one of my seed bands, and it flipping NEVER plays ISIS. I get about 3x more Pelican, Mogwai, Cave In, Russian Circles and RATM each than I get ISIS. Mind you I do like these bands, but c'mon.I've never liked the results doing that. For instance if I feed Pandora Owen Pallett it occasionally plays John Cale's Paris 1919, which I really like, but if I add John Cale to the actual mix, I feel like the mix becomes way too much Velvet Underground/Lou Reed early protopunk and way too little art-folksy Owen Pallett/Iron And Wine/Hayden/Ellie Come Home.
Maybe I'd get a better result if I fed it Owen Pallett and Paris 1919 (instead of all John Cale since Paris 1919 is fairly unique even for Cale), but generally if it starts to get monotonous I am happy to just pick/start a different station.
Even when it plays something that I intially don't think belongs, I have found that if I consider what it tells me under "Why This Song?" it makes perfect sense.
I don't really get complaints like SunnyD's. Pandora is for "sounds like" as opposed to "is on the shelf next to in the music store". The whole point is to hear other artists/songs than the ones you chose or are related-by-genre - it's a music DISCOVERY service, intended to expand your horizons. If you want to cherry pick songs and artists and not hear anything new, that's what Grooveshark is for. You can't really fault Pandora for not doing what it never said it was going to do in the first place.