I constantly struggle to find new music. Yes, there are a million resources out there – blogs, fan sites, news and reviews, venues, torrents, etc. etc. – but there’s so much music in the world that a lot of it ends up sounding the same, and I don’t want something that always sounds the same.

I decided I was going to try a streaming service for the sheer amount of music available. Pandora isn’t on-demand so that was out. I gave Rdio a shot because it was free and had just launched but their selection was woefully slim (they were missing big names like The Arcade Fire among some lesser stuff I was hoping for). From there I turned to MOG and I’ve been fairly impressed. Their selection is good, the iPhone app is passable, as is their web-based player, but I don’t think I’ve discovered all that much.

MOG does have a feature on the web player that allows you to broaden your horizons by including similar artists to the one at the top of your playlist, but it’s just not diverse. It’s the same thing with Pandora. What I want is some sort of discovery mode, where the player throws a wide selection of stuff at you, based not just on the music you’re listening to, but what other people interested in that selection listen to. I would love if it there was even some sort of blacklist feature so that you wouldn’t get the same old mix.

As a for instance, I’m listening to The Hold Steady right now. The similar artist list is about what you’d expect – Modest Mouse, A.C. Newman, Spoon, White Rabbits – all bands that someone listening to The Hold Steady would probably say, “Hey, you’d like these guys, too.” I don’t need that kind of guarantee, though. I want to hear a mix of stuff I might not like and might like and might be surprised I like, and I haven’t found a music service that provides that.

I probably won’t renew my MOG subscription beyond a month because I’m not getting a whole lot more from it than I can get from a Pandora. The on-demand is nice, but the web-player is a little clunky, and I have plenty of music to get through on my own.

With the iPad launching tomorrow there are a lot of apps to get excited about, not the least of which is Pandora. Pandora has been a huge success on every mobile platform. It’s also saved me from many a dull road trip with a virtually limitless pool of musical styles. The app got an update this week to include the iPad version and it looks great.

The update includes a large screen version for the iPad, making the artist description and album art that much more accessible. The update also adds album artwork for every station and improves streaming for quicker song selection and less service dropouts. I gotta say, I’ve never had serious problems with streaming, though it does occasionally seem slow, so the improvements will be great.

The really nice thing for the iPad is that everything is on one screen. There’s no flipping back and forth for stations and artist info and all that. The new app seems focused on users getting to know the artist’s their browsing which will be great for Apple with iTunes integration.

Today Pandora announced the release of a new desktop client for all Pandora One users to download. If you don’t know, Pandora One is the paid version of the popular Pandora online radio service that compiles playlists based on the style of a selected song, artist, or genre.

Along with your ad-free, desktop music listening experience, the Pandora One client update adds some features that were definitely missing from the older version. Among those features is listening history, which allows you to see what you’ve been listening to for the past hour. You also get a progress bar for the currently playing track, faster song transitions for your downvotes and skips, and track info on system tray hover for you Windows types.

One of the features I like the most is persistent placement/volume settings. No more fiddling around with settings when you open the app. It remembers where you placed it on your desktop and the last volume setting. Set and forget is a lovely thing, especially if its something you fire up at the office first thing in the morning.

You can read the full announcement over at the Pandora blog.