by SHANE SINNOTT

A while ago, I wrote about Slacker Radio (slacker.com—how they got that domain, I’d like to know), one of the many online “personal radio” services (pandora.com being the best known) that aim to give you a customized streaming radio “experience” that you can access from any web connection. You basically get to choose from a bunch of “stations” that play a certain type of music, and from those choices create custom stations made up of music by artists you like. It’s not quite like a jukebox, but it’s close enough.

The problem, up until now, with these services is that all the licensing rigmarole made them unavailable in Canada, and to access them, you had to go through a song-and-dance routine to hide your location that involved installing Hotspot Shield (hotspotshield.com). Two weeks ago, Slacker announced that they will be the first personal radio service to be (legitimately) available in Canada, though not without some changes to the U.S. version. The main goocher for Canadians is that the free version of the service, the Slacker Basic Radio, will only be available to you for 30 days, as opposed to forever south of the border, after which you will be forced to upgrade to the Plus service at $3.99 a month if you want to continue using it.

The wild card, of course, will be the licensing. While the company claims that they have agreements in place to “provide listeners in Canada with a deep catalog of music,” one would imagine it’s not going to be as extensive as the U.S. catalogue. Visit slacker.com to sign up.

YouTube, meanwhile, has launched the Music Discovery Project, which seems like one of the “playable search”-type things that are becoming so popular. You can try it at youtube.com/disco. Typing in an artist’s name will produce a list of videos, the idea being that the program will make some educated guesses in order for you to “discover” new music. Because, uh, lord knows that’s getting harder and harder these days.