Muchos props to Pandora and their music genome project, glad to see it appears to be succeeding. However, I never really found it a particularly good music discovery service for my own tastes. I get more out of digging around Youtube, subreddits, Newgrounds, and other social music discovery sites. But clearly there's room for multiple approaches to the problem.

And yes, having a phone app that you can sync with your web-based playlists is a good workaround to the native desktop client issue. Just listen on your smartphone instead.