It’s not without its problems which, lately, have been completely turning me off. First of all, it seems that over time, the algorithm for guessing what kind of music is similar to your taste is getting worse and worse. Either that or I’m listening to the wrong kind of music. Also, once you tell it you like a song, you’d think it would use that song to find more similar songs…but no, it plays that song over and over day after day until you thumbs-down it or put it on the shelf for a month (after the month is up, it starts playing it incessantly again). The past few months, they did the inevitable, which is to start playing annoying ads inbetween songs, and turning off your radio after 15 minutes or so of playing time just so you have to go back onto the site and look at ads.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was this: they used to have it so that when you used up all your song skips on one station and they kept playing shit you hated (happens quite often), you could go to another station and click through a few songs. Not anymore, you get a total number of song skips for your account, no longer for each station. This means that if one of your stations starts to piss you off and you skip a bunch of songs, you cannot skip more songs in other stations. What does this mean?

It means that I turn off Pandora and listen to music I have on my computer. Why would I want to be forced to listen to shitty music on ALL my stations? I keep telling it: NO JIMMY BUFFET but it doesn’t fucking listen.

I’m not just writing to complain though! There is something a lot better than Pandora. I don’t think many people know that they do internet radio (or maybe I’m just really ignorant), but last.fm has internet radio that’s a lot better. You can listen to combinations of tags (a lot like beeets, but for music and not events), and adding a song by an artists plays songs that are actually similar to it (no more Jimmy Buffet when I want Simon and Garfunkel).

Good music, good interface, no audio ads (yet!), no obnoxiously-low limits on skipping…in fact I’ve never hit any limit for skipping songs. Check out last.fm. They kick Pandora’s ass.