I’ve been kinda struggling with my online music listening for some time and am looking for some suggestions on alternatives. I've been pretty conservative when it comes to music - I still buy CDs and burn 'em. I refuse to support the whole DRM, nickel and dime you to death scheme that is online music purchases - I prefer to have a CD with a cover in my hand I guess. Of course, it doesn't happen often these days that I buy a CD. There's so much prefab crap coming out these days that all sounds the same it's hard to get excited about anything. <g>

But that's not the point of this post. Rather it's about streaming music or Internet 'Radio'. I’ve been using MusicMatch Artist Match Radio for some time and while I like the service and the price, I absolutely hate the Musicmatch software (the new Yahoo Music Match Jukebox is slightly better, but still a pig). For the last year or so since I started using Vista I’ve pretty much been using Media Player as my main music player and I’m fairly pleased with the new UI, how it works, performance and memory usage. Ideally I'd like to use something that works in Media Player.

I would love to find some sort of CD quality radio service that works with Media Player, but looking around it’s extremely hard to tell exactly what the music services offer or how they work. You can sign up given them your credit card and spend a day hunting through their sites trying to get out of the contract again when it's not right <s>…

Pandora – interesting but not quite

Couple of days ago I ran into www.pandora.com which is pretty cool actually – it’s a free service that provides Artist match like functionailty through a pure browser and flash interface. Music sounds awesome and the UI is OK through the browser. Selection is OK – some more arcane music and especially somewhat older stuff wasn’t found, but I suspect this service will continue to expand as more people get hooked up and search for things that aren’t there.

But being Flash driven it’s a huge pig – it runs my CPU at 50%+ while playing music and runs near a 100 megs of memory usage, which is Ok for my ‘media’ PC I have sitting next to my stereo in the living room doing nothing else, but not OK for a machine I actually want to use for real work.

Incidentally I was thinking that this sort of interface that these guys are doing would be an ideal trial for something like WPF/E and I’m curious if this couldn’t be done more efficiently. Of course the pudding in that site is the content and association system they have going. Great idea, but unfortunately a flawed implementation at the moment.

I also think anything purely executed in the browser gets in the way. It’s too easy to close the damn browser window down  accidentally when there are 10 others open and telling them apart.

So now what?

So… what other options are others using for online radio that’s not like commercial radio station but somewhat closely match

And no I haven’t bought into online music services and free monthly download and play plans. Frankly I’m too lazy to build my own playlists – I have enough of a hard time to do that with music that I already own and the whole point I like about these Artist Match type stations is that  they provide at least a rough selection that might make for good background noise throughout the day <s>. I can only listen to my Rollins CDs so many times in a day <bg>…

Really the idea of getting served music that closely matches some rough selection you provide seems to me is an ideal way to find new music I might actually buy (and it’s getting harder and harder to do this these days with the crap that goes for commercial music and even independent music these days).

So what are some other services people are using and what do you like? I’m familiar with MusicMatch and had a brief stint with ITunes… I suppose it doesn’t help that Microsoft has just about fucked everybody with the Zune strategy going a completely different direction than any of its previous partners. I guess that’ll rule out that anybody is going to try and support Media Player in the future. If you were a Microsoft partner on Plays For Sure I’m sure you’re not a happy camper <s>…

Thoughts?