Let’s face it: unless you’re a disciple of the Church of BET/MTV, chances are that you find traditional radio a sonic wasteland just as we do. There’s only so many blonde sexpots and bling bling rappers that one can endure before one wishes to place a shotgun squarely in jaw, or, longs to create his or her own radio station. And as we’re all about saving the cash, purchasing digital music is the next best thing.

Although we’ve recommended Amazon MP3 over iTunes in the battle of digital music stores due to the large savings and numerous freebies to be found, you can save even more dough, and discover or revisit thousands of artists, by pointing your internets toward Slacker, a free online radio station. Slacker allows music fans to groove to personalized music stations by tweaking Slacker’s numerous presets (programmed by pro DJs) or by creating their own. While there are other services that offer a similar experience (Last.fm, Pandora) we loves the Slacker more than its rivals because it’s far more accurate at returning related artists. What’s this related artist mumbo-jumbo we speak of?

Say you create a funk station and populate the artist list with James Brown and The Ohio Players. Slacker will fill in the other slots in your playlist with the likes of George Clinton, Parliament, The JBs, and other related groups with greater precision than its rivals (if you add 15 or more artists into a customized station, Slacker will not add additional artists and only songs from the specifically chosen bands will play on that station). You can further tailor each station by banning certain songs or artists, or favoriting particular tracks so that the play at a higher frequency.

Sounds pretty pimp? ‘Tis, but these are a couple of caveats to the free music: you can only skip a limited amount of songs, and you’re subject to audio ads (Slacker offers a premium version for a few bucks per month that eliminates ads, has unlimited skips, and lets you request or save songs).

If you’re looking to sample some of the goods, check out my Funk Soul Brothers station, or Lauren’s Custom Janet (Jackson) Mix. With Slacker, we guarantee that you’ll fall in love with music all over again. Rock on wit’ yo’ bad self.

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