Music radio is great. It exposes the listener to new artists, is generally free, and is available in many modern music players (but not natively on the ipod). Radio has predictably expanded it's distribution medium, embracing the internet, and there it's (probably) has been pretty successful. It's hard to tell, but note that all the big media programs (Windows Media Player / Itunes / Realplayer) have radio feeds built in.
There is a problem though - while the range and types of genres available for selection are many and varied, whether you like a particular song is probably still a hit-or-miss affair. With the advent of personalization technology, this is set to change. A pioneer of personalized internet radio is Pandora. From a single seed song / artist it auto-generates a playlist for you. We've been trying it out, and it's pretty good. There are a couple of wrinkles though: you need to create an account, and have a US zipcode - after awhile - and it pops up advertising unless you subscribe. Both of these are probably acceptable, because the music is gooood.
(We're not sure if it'll run on your mobile... You might need flash lite, and even then it might not work.)
[via igakunogakus
