Yahoo Music... Kinda Blows

So... I dunno how many people are familiar with Yahoo Music (http://music.yahoo.com). It used to be Lauch! referring to Lauch!cast radio or something but with the big emerging market in pay music downloads like itunes or even walmart music they renamed to Yahoo Music. Anyway...

Once upon a time I dug through Windows Media Player and found a great internet radio station. I really thought it was damn near the greatest thing ever. But, apparently the company doing it wasn't making any money because they sold out to... I forget, some Canadian company. That wouldn't've been that big of a deal, but the Canadian company cancelled my station. So, I went looking for internet radio stations that matched my music tastes. Enter http://launch.yahoo.com...

When I first signed up for Launch! I thought it was great. You could customize your own station and it was free, you just had to listen to some ads here and there. Far fewer ads than normal terrestrial radio. The free version of it happened to fit my needs perfectly. It was lower quality music so it cost Yahoo less in bandwidth but I didn't exactly have a T1 in my house back then either so I wanted the low quality anyway.

Not too terribly long after I signed up Yahoo realized they were streaming a whole lot of music and not making a whole lot of money. I mean, they had always pushed Launchcast Plus!, the pay version, so that was nothing new. But, what was new was that after 400 songs they seriously limited your ability to listen to what you wanted to listen to. How did they do it? They took away your ability to skip songs you didn't like. Doesn't sound so bad, right? I mean, who likes every song they hear on the radio? Except, Yahoo decided to really be pricks about it. Say you're like me and you like a wide range of music for the most part but in particular you love punk and hate rap and country? Every other song becomes rap or country. Not enough to make you turn the radio off. Just enough to annoy you into buying the upgrade to Launchcast Plus!

Realizing this didn't have enough impact Yahoo then made it so your radio would cut off for the month after some fixed number of songs. I'm not sure exactly what the number was, but I'm sure Yahoo planned it so that if someone listened to their internet radio station on a daily basis then far enough before the end of the month to be a major annoyance it would cut off. Now, we're not talking about listening 24/7. But, I used to listen a fair amount at work and even budgeting my listening so it wasn't 8 hours a day I'd still end up cut off well before the end of the month.

So, finally I sign up for the pay version. I'm tired of the annoyance, I've got plenty of money and then some, they seem to have a quality product even if their marketing strategy is annoying as all hell. And, what do I find?

I still hear a lot of crap and it's all main-stream. I still have to skip all the time. It's basically like listening to the normal radio. I get all excited when a song I like from a band I like comes on. Yet, I've rated tens of thousands of songs, artists, and albums.

What's up with that?

Anyone got any suggestions for a great internet radio site?