Recently I've been using online "radio stations". I figured it's about time to compare the "Big 3" as I see them: www.jiwamusic.com , www.pandora.com, and www.last.fm
JiwaMuisc: (Overall Grade: B-)
This french website let's user create and share playlists of songs. There is a lot of French music on the site which initially attracted me to the service. The site itself doesn't look pretty, but the playlist feature is unique. There are some great classic rock playlists on Jiwa and it's well worth checking out. What is nice about the site is that you can skip songs on a playlist and jump around as you see fit. This feature is lacking on other sites and can prove useful if you aren't in the mood for listening to a random selection of music. Another nice feature is that you can upload MP3's to Jiwa and therefore aspiring musicians can add their own material to playlists.
Pandora: (Grade: B-)
Powered by the Music Genome Project, Pandora let's you enter in the name of a band and it will serve up music to you based on both its analysis of songs' characteristics and how you rank particular songs. The sound quality of Pandora is great, but the musical offerings seem to be rather limited. I have found that when I enter in bands of similar genres(i.e weezer vs. spoon) the service chooses very similar song selections even though the "characteristics" of the two bands are extremely different from the point of view of a fan. I have spent quite a bit of time on Pandora ranking songs that it plays, but it still seems to serve up the same songs. The biggest problem with Pandora is that it limits the amount of songs that you can skip due to music licensing issues. Overall, the site is worth checking out but the repetitiveness of the songs gets to me over the course of the day.
Last.fm: (Grade: B+)
Recently acquired by CBS for $280 million, Last.fm has become my favorite station. Last.fm is very similar to Pandora in terms of how it serves up music, but its pool of music is much bigger due to a deal signed with Sony BMG that provides users access to the entertainment giant's extensive music catalog. One fault of the site is that there is sometimes a delay mid-song while listening. This doesn't happen with Pandora, so I'm 99% sure it's not a bandwidth issue on my part.
Last.fm strives to be a music social network but it still has a lot of improvements to make in terms of bridging the gap between the online world and the real world. I find their "Events" section to be rather disappointing but a step in the right direction. Within this section, you enter the name of a city and a radius and it will tell you concerts it believes that you will "enjoy". Unfortunately, I have found that the only concerts it provides information for are overpriced "big tour" concerts that I generally don't go to. If Last.fm started providing local concert listings for bands of a certain genre, I would definitely become a more active user of the service. Last.fm could create much real value for its users if it were to team up with a service such as iConcertCal, an iTunes add-on that compares your iTunes library to a large database of concert listings. Last.fm certainly has the means to partner with a service such as iConcertCal and doing so would not only help users find great local concerts but it could also prove to be the decisive competitive advantage within the online "radio station" niche.
For the past several months, 
