First off you need to add Within Temptation, Lullacry, Leaves’ Eyes and The Divine Madness they are the bands that comes closest to sounding like them. Lacuna Coil is a little more rockish, but you’ll want to add them as well. Naio Ssaion has the same pop goth metal sound as Evanescence, but with electric violins. Apocalyptica is mostly a instrumental band that uses cellos, although they have a few songs with a male or female vocalist.

Two bands you may or may not want to add are Nightwish and Epica. Nightwish to me sounds like 80s speed metal with modern distortion and medieval singing. Epica has the medieval vocals as well, but the guitars are a little milder. But it just depends on your taste, I’d check them out some samples before you add them though (Nightwish on Pandora, Epica on Pandora).

• Jim Brickman
• Lorie Line
• David Nevue
• Jennifer Thomas
• Paul Cardall
• Jim Chappell
• Jon Schmidt
• George Winston

There are plenty more than that though, but pick one of those and you can fine tune it. I like to thumbs down any songs that have other instruments or singing. This really makes great background music, because you usually forget it’s even playing. It’s a little melancholy, but it has become my favorite station. These artists don’t play classical songs either. They are considered “New Age”, but to me they are just piano soloists making beautiful music.

When I setup a Chuck Berry station on Last.fm, it was playing stuff not only from the 50’s but also Metallica, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Pearl Jam. I think it was too broad in finding similar music and on a whole Last.fm is much more broad in finding other songs to play than Pandora. I’ve also noticed that the volume of the songs being played on Last.fm are sometimes quiet, too loud or sometimes just right. Pandora has all their music at the same volume which is nice, because that means I don’t have to fiddle with the volume. The “social networking” aspects of Last.fm outweigh Pandora by a long shot but Pandora did add some new features lately. The only other thing Last.fm beats Pandora in is their wider collection of music. If I look for the band Justifide or Reform the Resistance in Pandora, I get nothing but Last.fm seems to have even the obscure and lesser known bands. I think Pandora outdoes Last.fm in many ways right now, since its radio stations are more finely tuned to what you like and are the same volume. The one thing that bugs me about Pandora is that sometimes they play the same songs too much, although u can click on a button to tell them not to play a song for another month. I cant say I used Last.fm as many hours as Pandora so I don’t know if they do the same thing or not, the volume changes were just too irritating to deal with, for me to use if for very long.