I love this topic. Found some great artist and you folks are soooo eclectic in your music.
I like Online (you design stations) some I have embedded in my browser (for convenience - you need lots of RAM for this) All these Pandora like stations do a decent enough job of aiming for the mood or genre of music you want to hear and all have good audio quality. Having mood music when surfing (or in our recent case doing online jigsaw puzzles) adds to the experience. I do suffer from "I can hear words in songs while I read syndrome" whatever that may be called - it's as bad as people talking to me as I read, ain't happening.
Here are a few I like.
http://www.radio-locator.com/ - is a neat link. It lets you pick where and what type of music/news/talk you might be interested in and it finds on-line radio stations (live feed) from around the globe. This is a catalog with links, but if you are feeling Irish today, why not settle for the real thing and actually go to a station, hear their DJs, commercials and all - make it a trip
http://8tracks.com/ - he is a novel idea, people collect at least 8 tracks of music, call it something, list the songs and gives feedback (the whole Facebook page thing where whatever you write a thousand people have to comment on it) but many people put a lot of though in their collection and many collection greatly exceed 8 tracks. Also they have bubble like tabs of mods of music to get you started.
http://www.last.fm/home - I like Lastfm a lot. I lets you create collection, for mixes of collection and offers slideshow images of the artist while the songs play. The one draw-back it will only allow you to skip so many songs in a row - most stations have a skip feature and you can can skip songs all day. But here you can create unlimited artist or genre listings, have the queue up for a days worth of music. Nice layout too.
http://www.stereomood.com/ is very basic looking, it fills your eyes with THEMES such as Happy, sad, work,relaxing, exercising, cooking, reading and on and on. Trying to fill the activity with music that blends in well. It also lists all songs that will follow, allowing you to jump around if you are at the keyboard. The really nice feature of this station is that many, if not most of the artists you have never heard of andthat is a very nice thing sometimes.
http://www.accuradio.com/ another slick looking site that might have a learning curve about it, but worth playing with. It is a bit like Pandora which most people are familiar with but it sits happily in my bookmarks for when I'm ready for a shopping spree of free music.
Hope you try some - I keep Lastfm embedded in my Firefox Browser. It is nice to just go to a channel I designed to hear what pops up that is new.
