I debated about writing an entire entry about why terrestrial radio is broken, and why I no longer listen to it when I don't have to. But in the end, I decided that it wasn't worth it. The short version is that they play too many commercials, the commercials seem louder than the music, and ClearChannel stations seem to take all of their commercial breaks at the same time. Another problem is that there isn't a whole lot of variety where I live (Cleveland), and we typically only have 1 radio station in each major genre.
A lot of my friends feel the same way. However, most of my friends have moved to listening to iPods.
I do have a hard drive-based MP3 player. However, no matter how many MP3's I have, it seems like I always get sick of listening to the same ones. For that reason, I moved to listening to Yahoo's Launchcast Plus [yahoo.com] internet radio service a while ago. Since I don't really drive that much, I was mostly concerned with listening at home and at work - places where computers are available.
One bonus feature about the service is that you can try it out for free. And they have tons of stations. Around the holidays, they usually have special holiday-themed channels. And they have a good assortment of different country music and classic rock type stations, which are the type I typically listen to.
One other nice feature is that the artist and song name are clearly listed in the Launchcast player (see image below). When I used to listen to terrestrial radio on a regular basis, I would recognize songs that I really liked, but could never figure out what band sang the song, or whatever.
In the lower left corner of the player, there is a skip button. This can be used if a song comes on that you don't like. It enables you to skip the song and start listening to the next one. That is one feature that you can't get with either terrestrial radio or satellite radio.
Unfortunately, one drawback about their player is that it only works in Internet Explorer in Windows. One reason that I list this as a drawback is that I hate Internet Explorer, and never use it unless I absolutely have to. Another reason is that the player crashes frequently, and I'm not entirely sure whether it is the fault of Internet Explorer or Yahoo's service. And finally, this is a drawback because not all of my computers are running Windows, and I would like to listen to internet radio wherever I happen to be, on whatever computer I am using.
That is really the only drawback, though. The service offers more music stations than you can shake a stick at, is relatively cheap, and commercial-free. I don't necessarily care about owning any of the content, since I would just get sick of it anyway. As long as they are constantly introducing new music and have a nice variety, I'm happy.
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