The death of radio has been predicted since the advent of television, yet somehow this little cockroach-like industry has survived. Music radio is an easy way for people to expose themselves to new, albeit commercial, artists. And you never discover new music if you listen only to your own MP3s. A couple of new services have me hooked and pondering how much longer broadcast music radio can survive.

Radio killer one: Pandora
Pandora is a small, slick music player created by the Music Genome Project. It's similar to Yahoo's Launchcast and others, but it works better than any service I've tried yet.

On the Pandora main page, you get a little flash-based player. To start your own station, you can put in the name of one or more artists. The station immediately starts playing songs based on the tastes of other listeners who also like that artist. You can teach the station what you like song by song and add the names of other artists you like later. You can also listen to other people's stations. Pandora gives you 10 hours of listening free of charge. After that, it costs $36 a year or $12 for three months.

Radio killer two: Last.fm
I've also spent a lot of time using Last.fm. Last.fm is a free service that has music stations as well. It learns what music you like by paying attention to what you listen to. The best way to get started is to download and install the open-source Audioscrobbler plug-in for whatever music player you use on your computer. I use it in iTunes. Audioscrobbler sends the song titles and artist names to Last.fm's Web site and keeps track of them in your personal profile.

Once you've listened to enough songs to provide good data, Last.fm starts putting people in your neighborhood. These are folks who have tastes similar to yours. It's a great way to find new artists. You can also listen to neighborhood radio stations that play songs based on what you and your neighbors like, and you can find similar artists by clicking through to artist pages. If you have friends using Last.fm, you can see what music they've been listening to.

The aggregation of the tastes of everyone using Last.fm helps the site to say with some confidence which artists you'll like. For example, I'm a fan of Uncle Tupelo. Last.fm rightly recommends Son Volt, Jay Farrar, Jeff Tweedy, Whiskeytown, and Wilco. Still not getting it? Fans of Britney Spears may also like Christina Aguilera, Kylie Minogue, and Lindsay Lohan. These may seem obvious, but lesser-known bands provide some really good recommendations.

Right now the identification of songs can be a little buggy because it relies on the ID tags of users' files. One of my favorite bar bands from Austin, the Wannabes, showed up as both Wannabes and WannaBes until I modified the info in my iTunes. However, the company is in the process of integrating with MusicBrainz. This project attempts to create a comprehensive music information site. MusicBrainz works in conjunction with FreeDB, an open alternative to GraceNote's CDDB.

I've found myself listening to more music and, as a result, buying more music since I started using Last.fm. It's revealing and educational, not to mention entertaining to see what friends have been listening to. One friend admitted to modifying what she listens to now that she knows we're watching. Me, I know my tastes are not hip or popular, but if you want to see what I've been listening to, you can find my profile here.

So will these services kill radio? Not yet. You still have to be at your computer to use them. Wi-Fi isn't quite ubiquitous enough yet to replace radio. And I'd look silly on the bus with my laptop open listening to tunes and making sure they got uploaded to Last.fm, which doesn't yet support MP3 players.

But even when you can find wireless Internet everywhere, my guess is radio will merge into the Internet as the Internet merges into the world around us. You won't be able to pick a day radio dies. Instead, radio will just come with a lot more features and, hopefully, improved quality.