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.

if i get recommendations from both sides and can’t tell which is better, does that mean Pandora has passed the Turing test?

In that area, neither are particularly good.

And it uses the audioscrobbler/last.fm data to track user listening habits!

Steve Krause has contributed to the ongoing Last.fm vs Pandora discussion with an excellent and in-depth post. He writes:
Algorithmically, Pandora versus Last.fm is something like the nature versus nurture debate. Taking the nature side, Pandora…

Are they manually tagged by a human ‘expert’ or is there any automated algorithm that analyses the music?

Over the past week, there has been some blog talk (Fred Wilson, TechCrunch, David Porter) comparing music-recommendation services Pandora and Last.fm. I’ve been using both for the past couple months, making notes along the way with the idea that I’d…

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

From a marketing (and psychology) standpoint this is quite interesting to watch.

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