Music apps for iPhone or iPod Touch

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I got an iPod Touch over Christmas and I've been installing apps for it.  In the last 24 hours. I installed both Pandora and last.fm app.

In some ways, I prefer the Pandora app.  It blanks out the screen after a period of non-use, much like the music player on the Touch.  It also seems like it is good at recommending similar music to what I like.

I have had a last.fm account f or some time and so I installed the last.fm app.  The problem that I have with the last.fm app is that it doesn't attempt to blank out the screen.  This, I'm sure, will quickly drain the battery by keeping the display fully illuminated.  I don't understand why this isn't user settable.  (Someone needs to fire the programmer on that app.)

Anyhoo, if you've got an opinion, please chime in...

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In settings for Last.fm, set "Disable auto-lock" to "Off".  Once you do that, then the screen blanks after a period of non-use.

I still like the Pandora service/app in some ways better than last.fm.  last.fm seems better for listening to songs you already like,  but Pandora seems better for establishing a style and then listening to different but similar artists and perhaps listening to artists that you haven't heard of before.

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I got a response from last.fm on my request for a Pause button.  It seems that their license doesn't allow them to provide a pause capability.  They can play or stop only.

What I had figured out was that both Pandora and last.fm allowed users to generate artist specific playlists that would feature the artists and similar music.  For instance, I have "Liz Phair" playlists on both Pandora and last.fm.  While listening to Pandora playlists, I can interrupt a song with the pause button if I get an external interruption (honey, please take out the garbage), but I cannot do the same with last.fm music app.

For me, the stop button in last.fm is superfluous, because it effectively stops whatever you're doing if you exit the app anyway.

I have a myspace page and I got hooked on Noush Skaugen, because she found me probably due to my fondness for artists like Liz Phair.  Well, when I created a Noush Skaugen playlist, I found Gemma Hayes, and so now I've created a Gemma Hayes playlist.

For me, this is rather an interesting way of finding new artists, because I can just listen to artists I like and the service kicks over similar music my way that I can then checkout or pass over.

If anyone else has recommendations for "finding new music", I'm always eager to find different ways.

That was one of the things that I did enjoy about LPF, but the message board seems to have lost many of its more interesting members.