Thing 42- Music

This was a fun and calming "thing" to do. I haven't used any of the services mentioned in this thing other than iTunes (which I use a bit). I really liked Pandora-- the organization and ease-of-use were understandable and easy. The user comments and forum threads were alright. I thought that the music selection was more limited, than the Last.fm. For example, I searched for Midori (the violinist) in Pandora but didn't find any recordings. When I searched Last.fm, I found several Midori tracks. Last.fm's organization was easy to learn and helpful. However, I did not like the posted "shouts" by people below the tracks. The comments weren't always constructive or objective. Depending on the artist/musician, some of the shoutouts were just strings of profanity.
I added the ShoutCast widget and as a lark had fun looking up Technopop music on it.
Although I usee Receiva.com to and found some Internet Radio stations, I was not able to open any of the stations to hear what they were broadcasting. Radio-Locator was just plain weird and not understandable to me at all. I couldn't figure out how to search for stations with it. I was a little skeptical when I went to the Live365 site since the other sites had been busts for me. It was a pleasant surprise when I could find a couple of nice Classical Stations that I could connect to. One station that I liked was: Classical 95.9 WCRI (Rhode Island). If I want to use Live365 regularly, it is subscription based.
What struck me about these music sites was that if you want to listen to the music in it's entirety or on a regular basis you must pay for it. It might be obvious but it's what I noticed.