977 Music: A Pandora Alternative

About two years ago I discovered 977music while trying to figure out a way to get my country radio here in Israel. For the first year or so this was a really great solution, there are many options for channels and social features, but I came to really miss real radio. Sometimes listening to hours and hours of music on continuous playback got a little boring, I missed the banter of radio hosts. True there are occasional commercials on this network to break up the music but this station just started to get a little monotonous.

At first the real draw to listening was the point system, it seemed like a really great idea listen to lots of music and get really awesome prizes! Who could say no? But after reaching 53k points the company behind the website decided to run a series of updates. Over the past year the point system has been put on hold and I have stopped listening.  There is much speculation across the forums about if the points will ever be reinstated.

Our listener rewards points program is temporarily on hold while we fix the issues with our new flash player not tracking points correctly.  We apologize for the inconvenience but be assured we are working hard to fix the problem.

Thanks for listening.

This message has been on the site for over a year. Something tells me that they are not coming back online or they are really having a tough time getting the system back to running.

On a positive note, the music played on this site is really good, there are many channels to choose from, my favorites are the country, 90s and today's hits. The only really problem that I came across when listening for many hours during the day was that many songs would come on multiple times. For example on the country station the song "Red Solo Cup" by Toby Keith would come up every few tracks. The song is good and amusing the first few times but then it would just get annoying!

If you are looking for a station to listen to the top tracks 977music is a good place to start, but I have been increasingly been unsatisfied with the results that I have found here. Since running a few updates from when I originally began to use this service their user interface has become much better and more user friendly. But I feel that the pretty UI does not make up for the amount of users who are disappointed with the updates like me.

Have you been trying to find a decent alternative to Pandora? Please share in the comments bellow your favorite music listening site.