Pandora

Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help you find and enjoy music that you'll love. It's powered by the Music Genome Project, the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken.

Pandora works by taking your personal music selection (any song or artist you may like to name) and feedback ("I like this", "I don't like this") and use then the information available within the Music Genome Project to create music stations that play songs that are in tune with what you have selected.

"Only the music counts. We don't care how popular the artist is, who's backing them, and we don't care which genre bin they usually belong in. Only the music matters."

Not bad at all. I was surprised by the good quality and musical relevancy of the suggested station tracks proposed by Pandora, and couldn't be more curious to find what the service what was going to propose next. As a matter of fact you can "fast-forward" in the playlist created by Pandora at any time and jump over any number of songs when you feel like.

But for me the greatest feeling was to let my newly created music channel play in the background, while discovering one by one the little nuggest the Genome Music Project engine was pulling out for me. And boy was I happy when the station started playing off some great Brothers Johnson stuff or some of those killer Average White Band pieces.

An integrated rating system also allows you to give thumbs up or to attach a negative rating to anyone song you are really listening to.

When clicking on the actual cover of the album from which the song has been extracted, you can in fact select to give a positive or negative rating to the selection being played. Not only. You can also create a new custom radio channel based on the style and characteristics of that very song, or head off to iTunes or Amazon to buy the individual track (iTunes) or the whole CD (Amazon).
At Pandora the first ten hours of listening are completely free. The service does not include any kind of advertising or promotional messages. After your initial ten hours of testing you can sign up for a whole year for $ 36 ($3/month) and use Pandora as much as you like.

More info about Pandora right here.