April 21, 2006

Update on Pandora/Last.fm Mashup

Michael Arrington

25 comments »

For those of you who are fans of Pandora, Last.fm or both, you’ll like this mashup by Gabe Kangas. I wrote about it last month, when it was a bit of a hack. Now, Pandora is fully supporting the effort and has even given Gabe access to the Pandora API to create a more stable application.

The mashup is basically the Pandora player, and listeners have the ability to add music played by Pandora directly to their Last.fm playlists. Last.fm favorite artists for the user are also displayed, and can be used to generate on the fly Pandora stations.

What’s amazing to me about Pandora’s official sanctioning of the mashup is that it is effectively taking Pandora user data and sending it directly to Last.fm. Good for them for recognizing that openness is better than closedness.

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Comments

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  1. Ryan Stewart

    That’s great news. The big question is when can the rest of us have access to the Pandora API. There is a ton of potential there.

  2. Saul Weiner

    This is huge. I’m a loyal last.fm user pretty much because it caught my eye before pandora. One thing I wish - that they could tap charts and you can tag charts - like vh1 top 20 or something like that. I know it’s a bit of a stretch from the model, but that would be great.

  3. Rikostan

    I love the way Pandora handles the music far better. It seems to be better at helping you find new music, but the community part of last.fm keeps me going back.

  4. Vincent Roussilhon

    It has to be noted that the plug with last.fm brings to Pandora the community side of the service that is is still lacking if you compare with last.fm (or even MyStrand). It makes sense for them to jump on this bandwagon.
    However it is in Pandora’s plans to introduce more community oriented features in the future. It will be interesting to see how they play their cards with this mashup when that happens.

  5. Jake

    With all the scarcity mentality going on, it is good to see a place willing to open its borders.

  6. Marc Novakowski

    Ryan,

    The events API is open to anyone who wants to use it. While we haven’t formally released any documentation on how to use it, here’s a quick rundown:

    If you embed the following “invisible” flash app in your page (just set the width and height to “0″), you can define Javascript callback functions:

    http://www.pandora.com/PandoraEvents.swf

    The four functions it may call are:

    pandoraEventsError(msg)
    pandoraSongPlayed(songName, artistName)
    pandoraSongPaused(songName, artistName)
    pandoraSongEnded(songName, artistName) {

    Take a look at the source for Gabe’s app at http://pandorafm.real-ity.com/controls.php for an example of how he’s embedding the Flash app and handling the callback functions.

    Feel free to send an email to pandora-support@pandora.com if you need help getting this going.

    Marc Novakowski
    Pandora Engineer

  7. carlo

    Awesome, I liked Pandora but comitted (paid) for a last.fm so stuck there, this is music to me ears (bad pun)… Oh dear… Thanks for the info :)

  8. Tina

    Ooh, sweet! I’m going to use this. I like Last.fm, but their radio is a bit limited, so this is the perfect combination :D

  9. Ohad

    I also am a great fan of Pandora.
    I think the next step for them would be to create some sort of community around their music.

  10. Andy A

    Some website owners need to realize that sharing their websites technology usually ends up helping all sites involved. Our site for example tries to take the best of all dating sites (via mashup) and combines it into one site, but just imagine if we had the blessing of other dating sites…

    Andy A.
    MEDIAFILL LLC
    http://www.collaboradate.com
    andya@mediafill.com

  11. adin

    And because of that support for the overall community, I’m going to go give Pandora some of my money. I hope that they’re recognized and rewarded for contributing to the overall community.

  12. irieb

    beta release - java 1.5 implemtation

    features:
    saves mp3s artist/album/song
    displays artist bio via http://www.last.fm lookup
    ID3 tagging via http://www.cddb.com lookup

    http://www.tengbob.com/pandoraMp3Grabber.zip

    java source included — string parsing is a little ugly — any regx wizards out there?

    known bugs:

    first song does not alway capture right
    only works on windows / firefox

    I will correct bugs in future releases…..

    enjoy and happy ripping….

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