People who love music seems to either be Pandora folks or Last.fm folks, and the two groups often disagree (see, for example, the comments to this post).
Quite frankly, the two services each do different things very well, although there is some overlap. Pandora is great for discovering new music based on what you like. Last.fm is also good at music discovery, but you can’t stream music directly from their site.
Where last.fm really shines, though, is in tagging and discussing music with friends. Because of the social aspects of Last.fm, a lot of people like storing and tagging their favorite music there.
Well, for those hard core users of both services, Real-ity.com has created something of a mashup (you will need a last.fm account to use this) – a clone of the Pandora player running on their server, with a script to submit any track directly to your last.fm account for later tagging, etc. The site will auto-determine the song and artist, although users can edit that information before submitting to Last.fm.
It’s rough, but it works. And it shows the power of users in the new web to manipulate services to do things that the owners may never have contemplated.
Mike, LAST.FM was down a portion of last night. I guess this attests to the high level of stress testing performed by Techcrunch labs
This is a great find, I will check it out in a week when they have recovered from your referral traffic!
My wife loves Pandora. I’ve shown her Last.fm and she couldn’t figure it out. She’s not a technical luddite, but she just loves how simple Pandora is. Enter an artist, and you’re hearing music instantly.
You can stream from last.fm. They have their own radio player – check out http://www.last.fm/radio/
Pandora rocks but I’ve never heard of Last.fm so I’ll be sure to take a look at it.
It’s funny how there’s still a lot of people who don’t know Last.FM. I’ve always been a little partial to the discussion of one service VS the other (back when I wrote this Techcrunch profile of Last.FM I said so as well) because technologically, last.fm makes more sense to me.
Now, this mashup is only that – a mash-up. But still, it isn’t bad that people managed to find a way to combine the two.
As Chris said, you can stream from Last.fm. In fact they is a Last.fm module for TiVo that you can have your own customized radio station stream live on your TV. Complete with album art. It’s amazing.
Yeah. My preference has always been Last.fm. No question about it. I personally find the streaming in Last.fm a whole lot better, even though it requires downloading the radio player to listen.
Pretty neat mashup though. I’ll have to play around with it more. Thanks.
Nice! I’ll be using this a lot. I like last.fm, but the simplicity of Pandora wins me over when I just want to listen to some music real quick.
Huge last.fm fan. Has a real chance to become a mainstream product like launch (yahoo music)
Check out MeX Browser :
http://fileforu...er/1138048724/1
lets you create mp3 playlist from each other super easily . last.fm is to complicated & clunky IMHO.
Pandora is way better. One you don’t need to install a player/codecs. Pandora also let’s you share your favorites and share your radio stations with others so I don’t know how that isn’t considered social. Pandora is also implicit, if you start a rock station most likley you will be listening to rock, so why is there a need to tag it anyways? I listen to a lot of metal/death metal and pandora has found so many bands I have never heard of before where last.fm is always playing the most popular songs I’ve already heard a bunch of times.
@xamox, looks like it’s down to each individual, because I had quite to opposite experience. Pandora would play all the obvious selections.
Pandora is good as a radio station that will play your tastes.
Last.fm is a good discovery engine based on your tastes.
So I like the choice of adding music to Last.fm through Pandora. I’ve been using it for the past few days, and it’s a great mashup!
Neato. It’s really cool to see Pandora used in new and unintended ways.
Too bad my salary is paid from advertising that was omitted from this mashup.
Is anyone else worried about giving their Last.fm password to real-ity.com?
I love Pandora and also am a power user of Last.fm using it to store the track listings from itunes. I use it to catalogue my taste in a particular week or the whole time. I like the mash-up but it doesn’t allow access to Pandora’s features like “Add to Favorites”. It would be nice for the two to partner up, but I don’t think it’s critical for them too..
Have you checked out yahoo’s radio.launch.yahoo.com? That is fantastic. I have been listening to this site for about 10 moonths now. You rate songs/artists/albums individually and it learns what you like. You start on one of about 100 radio stations and select what you do and don’t like on a scale of 0 to 4. It starts playing more and more accurate songs. You can even select different moods and taylor them as well.
I love Pandora! I love Pandora! (Screams the raving fan.)I haven’t even tried the Last FM, so who knows what I’m missing. It’s just that I’ve discovered so much new and good music on Pandora. I haven’t had this much musical discovery excitement since I was in a town with good radio. It’s like when you have a magical radio hour and like song after song. My favorite station is “Closer to you” by Brandi Carlile. And the interface is so clean and easy to use. I vote yes.
I did forget to add that Pandora, coolest ever idea that it is, is not really web 2.0. The main reason is that the masses can’t contribute to the information which is definatly a downfall. Discovering the musical “genomes” in each song is such a specific kind of knowledge, that mass contribution probably isn’t feasable. I do wish they would let people tag the music. I would like to tag my favorite songs for certain moods of mixes, as well as mixes for specific people, and holidays.
I feel for Eric at Pandora (about not getting ad revenue), but I guess that’s one of the potential downsides of mashup-culture. On the other hand, you’ve got a nice big bit of conversation around your product going on which has to be worth somthing
And yes, I did feel a bit funny about giving my username and password to an unknown and untrusted 3rd party. (I’m hoping that no one evil reads this blog, how could they?!? But if an evil person wanted to abuse lots of people giving over their usernames and passwords you could effectively start a massive evil spam project using the internal messaging capability of last.fm surely?).
Oh, and for what it’s worth I love both services.
Last.fm for the fact that once the widget is installed I don’t have to tell it anything really, it just sits there learning about what I listen to. Not what I say I listen to.
And Pandora’s recommendations work in a totally different way, equally good though.
I’m a big Pandora user, and a semi involved Last.FM-er. I have to say after looking over some of the comments, I think “Pandora” is much less involving than Last.FM. With Pandora, you tell it what you like, and the only intervention thereafter with the program is saying, “Yes i like this song”/”No I do not like this song” and it picks brand new music for you. Though some of the picks can be off a bit, u can skip them if theyre terrible. With Last.FM its more of like I see it a MySpace for music. You make a profile and it tracks what you are listening to and can show you other people who listen to that music, and thus you can learn about other artists in that sense, but that involves going onto the site, logging in, and looking around for new music. For this reason, I say…go PANDORA. I see no reason that Last.FM should even be connected to Pandora. One is a “standalone dynamic music player” the other is “a community of music lovers”…keep seperate and viva la PANDORA!!!!
Last.Fm is neat. I’ve really tried to use Pandora but it can’t guess what I like at *all*.
Last FM also has plugins for almost anything (including HTPC systems for Linux (Freevo and MythTV).
Why does anyone want to discuss their music with fellow randoms? Who cares, just listen to the music.
because Chris…. not everyone is a social hermit. People like to talk.
I’m crossing my fingers that Pandora reaches some sort of accord with gabe/real-ity, and doesn’t try any sort of shutdown.
I’ve been feeding Last.fm my music habits for a couple of months and I have yet to go inside and see what they have to offer me. Maybe I should do that now
But I’m concerned about giving my Last.fm info as well. It’s a great idea and I’m pretty trusting. But the risk outweighs the benefit for me right now.
I’ve written a brief comparison here http://aboutthi...s-im-hooked-on/ from an end-user perspective and still find I prefer Last.fm!
I don’t see any reason to be afraid of giving them your last.fm logins. Spam? Nah, this is someone trying to do good.
And last.fm isn’t just about music chatter. The fact that you can learn about the artists and music is so much more interesting than Pandora, from which it is a pain to check out the album (having to go through amazon), or the artists genre and related stuff.
Eric and Pandora:
I listen to Pandora (non-mashup) by going to pandora.com and clicking “minimize” which gives me a player window with no ads.
So how is this any worse than this mashup?
:d
Is that Last.fm doesn’t have a lot of stuff that Pandora does.
I’m listening to something on Pandora right now that isn’t streamable on Last.fm. And probably won’t be, because they don’t add a lot of new albums that often.
I prefer Pandora for now. But I agree they could add some features. See my review:
http://newmodel...b.blogspot.com/
Last.fm has always played more music that I’m interested in than Pandora.
The great thing about Pandora is its spontaneity. It is designed to allow users to discover new music. If they somehow embrace social tagging of songs and artists then it will leave Last.fm in a trail of dust.
http://lastpandora.com is a rebuild of PandoraFM that does this now, also.
does this now, also.