Those of you who used the great Pandora service will know that those outside of the USA had the service cut off in January 2009. This was due to licensing issues and the record industry being greedy and wanting high royalty fees for Pandora to offer its service worldwide. Therefore they decided to not pay the fees and cut the service instead.

You can still access Pandora outside of the USA if you use a proxy like Hideyourass, but it doesn't always connect and the streaming can keep dropping, so it isn't a good solution.

Therefore I was looking for alternatives to Pandora and have just started using one called Spotify.

http://www.spotify.com

And I highly recommend you take a look. It installed a standalone application on your PC, instead of needed to steam through a web browser. I much prefer this method, and it makes it much nicer to have the application loaded in the background while you work. It also means that if the browser crashes you don't suddenly lose your music.

It also seems very fast and the audio quality to very good. And so far it has found everything I've search for. And its interface is quite standard if you have ever used a music library program like MediaMonkey or iTunes.

And best of all. It's free! It does load a couple of adverts into the interface while you are using it, and you also get the occassional audio advert, similar to radio adverts, between some songs, but they are unobtrusive and it's not really worth paying for the pro version to remove them.
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In addition you may also like to get back the Pandora feature of suggesting similar music to something you already like.

For this you can use Last.fm

http://www.last.fm/

And a great feature of Spotify is that you can add your last.fm account details to it to add it's features into Spotify.

In the end I think the combination of these two sites/applications creates a greater solution than Pandora was. A little sad considering Pandora invented the idea, but as end users the easiest, best designed, and smoothest to use solutions will always win in the end.
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