Music Makes The People Come Together

I've switched over the last week or so from Pandora to Last.fm, and I'm totally digging it...mostly.

I've never been totally happy with Pandora. I get tons and tons of repeats on all my Pandora stations. I donno, maybe I'm doing something wrong. But one of my stations keeps playing the same four or five Cowboy Mouth songs over and over again. I dig Cowboy Mouth quite a lot, but when I'm listening for two hours and every fourth song is the same band, that's pretty annoying. On a different station, I keep getting Louis Prima's "Just a Gigolo" and "Jump Jive and Wail" over and over. Tremendously annoying.

I'm not getting nearly as many repeats on Last.fm, though it does seem to want to play "In the Waiting Line" by Zero 7 pretty frequently. Overall I'm much more satisfied with the variety. The biggest problem I've had with Last is the strange things it decides are "similar" to the stuff I like. I enter the name of an artist I like - Weezer, U2, Barenaked Ladies, doesn't matter, every now and then it decides I need to hear some fucking Death Cab for Cutie or Fallout Boy or some other shit that in the realm of guys who inexplicably think they look good in skintight low-rise jeans. Eventually, through the use of the "Ban" button, I'll weed out every goddamn Death Cab song out there. I just have a hard time accepting it when I say I want music similar to the Pixies and the internets tell me that what I want is Sufjan fucking Stevens.