I've been playing around with last.fm recently. I like the idea of it -- there's a plugin you load into iTunes which spies on you and phones home to the server. So in theory, I get to do what I usually do (listen to my own collection) and the website makes recommendations based on that.

But, I've been seeding it for a couple months now and it has recommended very little that I wasn't already familiar with, and most of the others have been head-scratchers.

Also the "Last.fm Player" program that runs when you click on "listen" links on the site is pretty crappy. Do I really have to click on the link four or more times before it plays that song, or is it just lagged all to hell? I'm still not sure. And of course a 30 second preview is barely enough to get past the intro of a lot of songs, so it's mostly useless even when it does work.

Then they've got the usual blogging / popularity contest crud bolted onto the side, as is de rigeur for every web site these days. I haven't even looked at that part.

Pandora seems like it could be cool, but like most of these sorts of sites, it's far too interactive. To use it, I have to be listening to their stream and end up having to kill songs a lot -- which doesn't even work, since they will only let you skip like 4 songs an hour or something, so to use it, you end up being forced to sit through a lot of crap, just like that "radio" thing they used to have back in the nineteen-hundreds.

Is there anything that works better for discovering new music?