Found out about Discover Music - Pandora through Lifehacker (new must read blog I just discovered). I'm not sure exactly how it works, but basically you tell it a song or artist you like and it finds and then plays a song by that artist. You give a thumbs up or down as to if this is the type of music you like, and if plays music similar to that.
In my case I started with typing in "Blue Rodeo" as the band, it played "Bad Timing" as the example tune, and then from there played "I'm Over You" by Keith Whitley. Not exactly the same genre, but the same "sound". From there it went to "You Woke Up My Neighborhood" by Billy Bragg, who I've never heard of, but again, had the same sound.
I'm not sure if they use a similar system to audioscrobber for their data or what (it says it's part of the Music Genome Project). Seems to work well though.
Posted by Arcterex at November 15, 2005 08:53 AM
Try out Launchcast from Yahoo... I have been using it for one or two years now. Same concept as that, but maybe even better. Big community, well tested, TONS of music, etc. It's all based on ratings - you can't control at all what will play next except by voting on what you hear. For every song you here, you can vote on the song, album, and artist... so you can say "I don't like this song, but wouldn't mind hearing other songs from this album but not the artist". It's more likely to play songs that you have positively voted. It'll also play songs that other people who liked what you like listen to, if that makes any sense. Quality is great, only downside is that it requires IE and you can't easily save to disk... so I use Launchast when online, and normal MP3 collection when offline, in the car, etc.