2. Music From "Radio" Channels

Aside from your own music, there are hundreds of different "radio" channels that you can tune into. The nice thing about these channels is that they don't carry any advertising, something that can't be said about some of the satellite channels. And there is a lot to choose from. Under Blues, you can pick a particular decade (such as 30s Blues or 70s Blues). The following subgenres are listed under the New Age category:

Adult Alternative Ambient Contemporary Instrumental Ethnic Fusion Meditation Nature Neo-Classical Progressive Electronic Relaxation Solo Instrumental Space Spiritual Techno-Tribal

This seems like quite the assortment and somewhat overwhelming and daunting to choose the right music collection. In practice, any New Age channel I listened to ultimately brought me back to Enya, which could be good or bad depending on your own particular tastes. Perhaps there is too much of a good thing here, although I am by no means a New Age music expert.

Mercora M running on Palm's Treo v750

One of the strengths of the M service is that if you don't like any of their channels, you can create your own. You type in the name of a band and it will assemble music around that particular band's genre, and hopefully keep your interest. In practice I found its recommendation engine less than stellar, and certainly nowhere near the quality of similar engines that are part of Amazon's bookstore or Netflix's video library.

While it found even some fairly obscure groups in a wide array of music genres, the music that it collected for that channel left something to be desired. For example, when I created a channel for Mark Knopfler (whose music crosses a lot of different genres), I was listening to several songs by Tina Turner.