Fred Wilson has a good post today comparing the Last.fm and Pandora music services. He’s strongly in favor of Last.fm.
I use and have written about both services. Each allows you to find new music that you are likely to enjoy. Last.fm does this through analysis of what you listen to and like (and what others listen to and like). Pandora encodes different aspects of music and determines what you might like based on those factors.
Pandora is easier to use because it takes absolutely no setup and streams music on the site itself. Last.fm uses tagging and has social network aspects, but you have to download the player to listen to music.
I find Last.fm to be better at playing music I’ve heard before and like, whereas Pandora tends to introduce me to entirely new bands.
Both are excellent. Tonight, in honor of Fred, I’ll be listening to Last.fm.
also check out this: http://norevolu...din-part-i.html
I have used both services as well. And though Last.fm requires more input on my behalf, I also find it to be better than Pandora. I’m often more interested in hearing my favorite music as opposed to what someone else thinks sounds like my favorite music. And Last.fm does a great job doing just that. I create tag-stations for work, coding at night, anything I want.
Whereas I find Pandora often misses the mark on what kind of music I like.
My Last.fm neighbors and friends tend to know what I like more than a group of sound experts.
I like to think of Pandora as the Yahoo model, with editors that are experts, and last.fm as the google model, distributed and emergent. I like the idea of pandora, but it doesn’t scale. There were a lot of songs that it just doesn’t have. I heard an interview with the guy who runs it, and they said it takes about 30 minutes to code each song. That’s just too long, especially as the market progresses to more and smaller artists.
Pandora by its simplicity is a great service. I only wished they cover classical music and also more ethnical. The quality of audio streaming is outstanding. i wrote about them in the past and to me they have a winner user experience approach http://ouriel.t...ra_discove.html
As you say both are useful and good at different tasks. Pandora is excellent for kicking off and leaving in the background while Last.fm is a bit more work but better if you know what you want to listen to that evening. I also find Pandora streams more reliably than Last.fm.
Paul, yeah, sometimes the Last.fm player just crashes. Pandora never does.
There’s a very simple reason why I use last.fm and not pandora – pandora has never heard of artists I like, but last.fm has. i have tried pandora many times, but none of the artists that make up my primary playlist can be found on pandora, despite (in at least one case) the artist being a multi-platinum seller and multiple award winner.
Last.fm? found my favourites, listed, sorted and streamed similar artists, many of whom I already know and like, and many more who I know like.
I’m a much bigger fan of Pandora, probably because I like discovering new music. I find the social system used by last.fm (the same, essentially, that amazon uses to recommend music) sort of becomes a popularity contest between music, and some interesting lesser-known artists will often lose out.
With Pandora’s “genetic” approach to music, you get music based solely on its musical similarity to the band you asked for, so, like Paul said, it’s good for kicking off and leaving in the background, but a lot of times something interesting will pop up, and voila, you have a new favorite band.
The interesting thing about Pandora for me is that I’ve discovered a number of bands I would have never heard before. It has resulted in multiple music purchases for me. So, if other consumers are anything like me, this is a really good thing.
I haven’t used the music player on last.fm yet. I suppose I should try it out.
I agree with you Pandora is easier to use but in my mind the music catalog from last.fm is larger.
The buffer in last.fm suck me, pandora is better for listening music…
For my musical tastes (fairly adamantly anti-mainstream), my experience has been that Last.FM has frequently introduced me to new bands, whereas Pandora can’t even find bands I already know I like when I type in their names.
So, yeah, I’d add my voice to the crowd noticing that Pandora as it is now just doesn’t scale to a wide audience.
Unfortunately, the usability of Pandora’s interface is a lot neater, which made for an exciting first few minutes (until the realization hit that it couldn’t find much I actually wanted to hear). Maybe they’ll get their content issues sorted someday, but until then, I’m sticking happily with Last.FM.
I’ve used both Pandora and Last.fm, but recently have also started using the Yahoo Music Engine. It’s not bad! It takes some training with ratings, but the “my station” on Shoutcast is actually not too bad at picking out similar music. I’m glad to see the variety among players out there–a good range between simplicity and features and types of music.
I think it all comes down to what you would rather listen to: music you love OR music that technically sounds like the music you love. I remember trying Pandora back in the day and putting in a few artists I like – Strokes, Franz, Interpol, whatever – and while it usually starts out well, in half an hour it slides into the same MOR crap that’s all over the radio (Nickelback, etc). The problem with Last.fm (which is probably my favourite web service, and one of the few that I actually paid money for) is that in order to use it’s best feature – Personalized Radio that plays only the artists that you like – you need a pro account. But the Pro Account costs… as much as you’re willing to pay for it (I loved that idea too), and plus if I want music recomendations I would rather trust people who listen to the same bands as I, rather than an algorithm. In this aspect at least, I think Judson got it wrong. Last.fm -> Yahoo social model; Pandora -> Google algorithm model.
Pandora wins on usability (no app to launch), but I agree with the previous commenter – it doesn’t scale well.
Update:
I have now tried the last.fm player as well. I think that it is better at playing the songs I know and like, but it is not good at buffering. If I select a different application many times it either stops playing altogether or starts to stutter. This really never happens with Pandora is excellent that way and sounds great.
It’s crazy to read that people actually like Pandora. Like Fred, I try it every few months and really try to give it a few hours and it absolutely makes my ears bleed.
These services all confirm to me that humans make the best DJs. I find myself listening mostly to Sirius online when at my PC.
I notice that commenters seem to be males and I’m assuming that ages are probably 30 and below. So here’s some feedback from an old female who loves Pandora. No, they don’t have all the artists that I want to listen to, so I make suggestions. They respond with requests for album titles and perhaps they will include my favorite artists later. Pandora is easy to use, stable and the stream is decent. The form factor is attractive, and with one click I can access album info through Amazon. Pandora has introduced me to many artists new to me, and if it goes off on a tangent I can easily get it back on track by giving negative feedback on cuts I don’t like. I also prefer not to have to install an additional player.
Despite a number of shortcomings (so?), Pandora has introduced me to new artists several times, and in areas of music I thought I knew pretty well. When they start to ‘grok’ what a social envelope could do for them (viz. tagging, listening to other people’s stations, etc.), that’ll open up an area of growth. As to last.fm, many friends of mine like it, but I don’t understand why I want someone to play ‘my favorite music.’ I already *have* that!
There’s a very simple reason why I use last.fm and not pandora – pandora has never heard of artists I like, but last.fm has
Hunh. I had the opposite happen. As of six months ago (granted forever in internet time) last.fm had a skimpy to non-existant selection of music I like. Pandora had me when I entered ‘Robert Earl Keen’ and hoy presto there he was – and an obscure REK tune at that.
I’ve tended to use last.fm more. Though like the consensus, I do like the Pandora interface more. But I end up using MyStation through Yahoo music the most. I can launch it from within the IM client and it does a good job of playing music I like after not too long a time supplying feedback.
To me, they seem like they do the same thing but really, they don’t.
Pandora is purely for discovering new music. So, the interface/ease of use are really not too important as long as it recommends that music you haven’t heard before that you like, and for me, it does.
Granted last.fm can recommend new music and does a decent job at it. But it’s also about social listening, tacking your listening habits, meeting like minded people and much more.
I, personally use both because last.fm just doesn’t introduce me to new music as well as Pandora does and Pandora doesn’t give me the social and tracking stuff that last.fm does.
Lastly, I wrote about these services recently, my thoughts here.
-dg
I tend to agree that both Pandora and Last.fm are interesting to have for different reasons. What I find quite fun to observe is the differences between the crowd supporting Pandora and that in favour of Last.fm: my reading of the typology is that if values like “sharing”, “communicating”, “exchanging”, “discussing”… are important to someone they will rather be on Last.fm’s side, whereas people who have less of a “people / social” bias in their values are more likely to find Pandora good. I also noticed that people who are “machine-averse” (e.g. people writing things like “I don’t want a machine telling me what music to listen to”) will be less likely to enjoy Pandora, which has a little bit of an AI or HAL9000 touch to it.
From a marketing (and psychology) standpoint this is quite interesting to watch.
I’ve tried both and for the short time that I was allowed to use Pandora (I’m un-American so I can’t register and therefore don’t have a choice) I enjoyed Pandora’s interface and liked it’s “analytical” approach to why it’s pllaying what it plays…
However, I’m a huge fan of Last.FM it has a far wider range of artists and music than Pandora, allows artists to sign up, upload or licence their tracks and have them playing (unsure where Pandora allows that, but then I’m un-American so I’m not allowed to find out) and has exposed me to artists and music that I sincerely doubt I’d hear elsewhere.
Last.FM does have it’s technical problems and IMHO its recommendations can be a little idiosynchratic (but that’s nothing that the Ban and Dismiss buttons can’t handle even if not all of my recommendations are streamable)
I’m sure if Pandora starts realising that there’s a whole world beyond America that I’ll go back to using it as well as Last.FM, but I prefer Last.FM because the social aspects are there, I can browse and search artists recommend and add recommendations,
As for Launchcast, well they appear to classify Avril Lavigne as heavy metal and I could spend all day banning Ashlee Simpson, NSync and their ilk as artists and still get them playing!
Launchcast != for me
I finally gave last.fm a shot last night… it’s splogger tool bogged down my 1GB RAM / 2.2 ghz chip box (not top end but still…) with a maxed out CPU so I dumped it, maybe later, Radio Paradise works for me and I’m not even pluggin, I’d love to check it out if I hear different, peace
Is anyone aware of how pandora determines the attributes of a particular song before it recommends it?
Are they manually tagged by a human ‘expert’ or is there any automated algorithm that analyses the music?
Here’s another music recommendation service which I think its worth to mention it, its called ‘Foafing the Music’ http://foafing-...sic.iua.upf.edu
And it uses the audioscrobbler/last.fm data to track user listening habits!
In answer to Joe, Pandora is apparently built on human analysis (with a checklist). I’ve found I get more interesting recommendations on a wider group of artists via last.fm. I’ve also found the sound quality a little better.
In that area, neither are particularly good.
There’s no vs. anymore: http://www.real...ty.com/pandora/
so if Pandora is more “machine” like, and Last.fm more “human”, is this a good case for Turing Test?
if i get recommendations from both sides and can’t tell which is better, does that mean Pandora has passed the Turing test?
Pandora and Last.fm works in opposite ways. While Pandora streaming music you’ve chosen to your computer, Last.fm colects information about you are listening to in you media player (cd or mp3). Last.fm has a RadioPlayer too, but it isn’t his goal.
For pure pleasure at work, Pandora wins
As much as I like last.fm and I really do, the constant buffering annoys the beep off me. For some reason pandora never does that. Sometimes Pandora goes into a technical difficulty but once you refresh it, the problem seems to go away.
I wish last.fm would not be so unstable because I like it’s collection of songs better. last.fm has many artists that pandora does not have.
I can’t really make last.fm work for me either and honestly got better results out of Launch than either of the others. Now, alas, my brilliant (to me) Launch station is no more. Ugh.
I can’t really make last.fm work for me either and honestly got better results out of Launch than either of the others. Now, alas, my brilliant (to me) Launch station is no more. Ugh.