So, at this point, I’ve loaded up my Pandora profile with all my favorite music. Note that most of what it plays isn’t the music I’ve selected (though of course it plays that, too), but various music that shares traits with music I’ve selected. Pandora’s generally very good at finding new music that doesn’t necessarily sound much like the songs I’ve picked, but sound great anyway (and therefore, it’s a good source for finding new albums to buy).

Our other favorite source for music was the International Music Feed channel we could tune into on our Dish Network satellite TV. It played new music from across the globe. We discovered Joss Stone and Amy Winehouse through that channel… sadly, IMF is no more. It was bought and assimilated by another music channel, which seems a lot duller and plays a lot of documentaries. *sniff*

When I’m working on stuff at home, I like to listen to music, and the speakers on my laptop suck. We don’t have an “entertainment center”, so that pretty much means we listen to music on the TV. That was a lot easier when there was a decent music channel… but you can surf the net on Wii (if you buy the “Internet Channel” for $5, and have a wifi connection). I was dismayed to discover that it can’t handle Pandora (runs out of memory), so I looked around for alternatives.

It turns out that finetune.com is pretty decent, and has a wii-specific portal, so I’ve filled up my playlist on FineTune, and am pretty happy with that. Unlike Pandora, it plays exclusively my selected songs, so it may be a more accurate reflection of some of that… except that has a smaller selection of music, so it’s missing some important (but lesser-known) interests of mine. The Delgados, Propellerheads, Lunatic Calm, and Nickel Creek are among the under-represented. Besides that, you can only have up to three songs from any one given artist, so there’d be a lot more Massive Attack and Crystal Method in there to make up for the one Brittany Spears song I’ve got in there *blush* (“Toxic”. What can I say?).