Slacker ! A Web Based Internet Radio!
The free beta of the Web-based Slacker service–which comes from a startup founded by veterans of MusicMatch, Rio, and iRiver–is more traditional than Last.fm and Pandora, which focus on attempting to find new music you’ll like based on your favorite artists. Slacker has lots of genre-based stations, from Today’s Hits to R&B to Chill to Traditional Mexican. You can skip past songs you don’t like (up to six times per hour for any station), mark songs as favorites (so you hear them more often), ban them (so you don’t here them), or add artists to stations you wouldn’t otherwise hear them on. You can also create artist stations, which, like all such stations on the Net, play music by the performer in question as well as ones who Slacker deems to be related in style. It seemed to do a pretty good job in my experiments, and as with genre stations, you can tweak artist ones to emphasize the stuff you like. Everything’s based on 2,000,000 tracks licensed by the Slacker folks, so there should be plenty of variety. And by searching for your faves and adding them to custom stations, you can mix artists and genres with eclectic abandon and fine-tune aspects like whether you hear mostly hits or more obscure stuff.
