Now the music you want to listen to is online for free, without breaking any laws. There are at least a dozen sites following in the footsteps of Pandora, like Last.FM, Jango and Finetune, that are like internet radio, except with music and playlists that are tailored specifically to your likes.
“Basically these are all ad-supported websites supported through visual ads, not through audio ads,” said Kyle Monson of PCMag.com. “So unlike terrestrial radio, where you're hearing ads every few songs, you're not going to get any interruptions of your songs. You're just going to have ads to look at when you go to the websites."
"Some of these sites let you build playlists where you're actually picking the individual songs you want to hear," he continued. "Others let you pick an artist and then base a station on that artist, so they pick similar artists and similar songs. But either way you're getting a lot of customization and a lot more control than you would with normal internet radio.”
Internet users can now craft playlists of favorite music and share their musical tastes at a variety of different sites – for free. Adam Balkin has more.
Many of the sites are also designed to be social, meaning users post their custom playlists on the site for others with similar tastes to grab and play for themselves. So the sites help those of us stuck in a music rut to discover some new artists.
But there are some inherent disadvantages to these services. For starters, unless you want to take your whole computer with you, you can't take the services with you, because the playlists can't be offloaded to digital music players like iPods.
“So in order for these websites to be considered web radio you can only skip a certain amount of songs, so if you don't like five songs in a row you can't just skip five songs,” said Monson. “Also, the playback order is going be randomized so you can order the songs in the order you want to play them back. You have to have at least 15 songs, so you can't just pick a playlist of five songs and play it over and over again.”
If you're interested in giving one of these services a try, maybe at the office where you can't store music files on your computer, check out www.pcmag.com.