I stopped my XM Radio subscription at the in January of 2009. I moved to listening to streaming radio on my iPhone. In the first couple of weeks of listening to it in the car I realized that the audio quality in Slacker Radio was far superior to Pandora. I have an after market stereo in my Equinox and you could hear an noticeable compression of the music on Pandora. So I ended up signing up for Slacker Radio Plus. Oh what a mistake that was!

Slacker radio sucks on so many levels it is hard to list them all.

The user interface has a lot to be desired. They have a lot of options that create way too much complexity for building a station and listening to it. The iPhone user interface is acceptable but the desktop and web version are horrid.

They say that they don't have ads inside the premium version. For a while they started selling ringtones of the song that you were listening to. I filed a complaint with their customer service department and they said that selling ringtones was not advertising.

In the sales documents you should be able to pull up any song you want to whenever you want. This is not true. You can add a song to your radio station and you have a 50% chance of hearing it right away. I contacted customer support on this and they said that this is not possible as it is like radio and you have no control over what song you hear next. I understand that from a licensing perspective but the sales documents make you think otherwise.

Slacker Radio does use AAC for their compression of the audio files. So the quality of the music itself it good. However it does not make up for the lame playlists that they put together for their pre-built genera stations.

The thing that killed about Pandora was this compression sound. It sounded great on the desktop but over the air on the iPhone just sounded horrible. I contacted Pandora support and they said that there was nothing that I could do about this issue. A few days later I opened up Pandora by mistake and hit the settings button. To my shock I saw there was a "higher quality audio" setting. I switched it on and the compression noise disappeared. I found myself only listening to Pandora again for the next month. Their technology that maps my music genome is genius! I hardly ever skip a song. So in my support I went ahead and purchased two Pandora One accounts for Joni and I. The desktop application that comes with the Pandora One account is brilliantly done and supports keyboard shortcuts. You can ALT+TAB to it and hit the space bar to pause it. The up and down arrows control volume and the right arrow will skip to the next song.

Pandora wins the premium radio for me hands down. Too bad I can't get my money back from Slacker Radio :/