Rdio works from a web browser, provided you have Flash installed.
Pandora doesn’t keep posting on Facebook what my friends are listening to.
Neither does Spotify unless it’s calibrated to do so.
Considering I listen to music at work all day, every day, Pandora works better with me, despite the limited song availability (although I’ve noticed the variety increasing compared to when I first tried it and even a couple of years ago). Also, you can create your own station, seeding it with the artists and songs you want. You don’t have to have a predetermined station. So a custom station is their version of a playlist, that at least gives you the opportunity to listen to new songs. I dislike the rancheras that occasionally pop up, but I deeply enjoy the new music I’ve learned thanks to it.
I’ll have to give it another shot. My main issue with Pandora was the shallow music selection. Even with twenty or so stations ranging from 80s post-punk to Lady Gaga to early 90s rap, to Krautrock, to Hindi music, etc., even on “Quick Mix,” it felt like I was hearing the same damned songs over and over and over again. There was absolutely no depth to the playlists. In that sense, it really was like an actual radio station tailored to my tastes.
Spotify has a radio function that works somewhat like Pandora but uses playlists you’ve already created to seed your radio feed. You then tell it if you like the new song and it will add it to a new playlist for you. I like how it uses your entire playlist to suggest songs, rather than just a single artist or genre.
It still is that way, but I’ve found that each time I’ve been able to seed it with more and more artists/songs that I like, plus there are adding new songs that already fit some of my seeds. I’m sure this is why for years I had no problems with sudden presence of ranchera songs, and now I have to keep giving thumbs down on all of them (they showed up).
Well, it may take some time, but you can add your playlist artists and songs to the seed… My personalized station goes from classical to hip hop to folk to other rhythms.
I dunno. I signed up and downloaded the Windows client, and at every turn it seemed like it was cramming Facebook down my throat. “Sign in with your Facebook account and see what your friends are listening to!”. well, I don’t have a fucking Facebook account and I don’t have any fucking friends so I canceled that bullshit.
You know what would be great? If Pandora let you design stations based on song attributes from a dropdown list. I’d love to experiment with stations, create ones with all sorts of interesting traits like complex/varying time signature, modal harmony, minor key tonality, instrumental arrangement and see what it brings.
You can kinda do that with “why did you play this?” and thumbs up and thumbs down, but you never see the entire list of attributes, so you couldn’t be sure what you were telling it to use and avoid.