Comparison of Pandora and Last.fm

An anonymous reader writes "Blogger Steve Krause takes an interesting look at how music recommenders Pandora and Last.fm work, including some algorithmic strengths and weaknesses. Although he seems to think Last.fm is better now, his punchline is that a combination of their approaches will eventually be the real winner and for that, Pandora can more easily become like Last.fm than the other way around."

Pandora rocks

[grimner]

I've been using Pandora for a couple months now and have been *very* impressed with it's song choices. I haven't tried Last yet but from the description it sounds like Pandora has an advantage over Last in that you are more likely to find new music. I've found that about half of Pandora selections have been artists I haven't heard of. Truely refreshing. If you just want to find what other similar people are listening to you can always use Amazon Suggests. Nothing special there.

I like != I don't dislike

[dfarcanjo]

Liking a particular artist, CD or song is definitely not the same as not disliking it. I find a whole bunch of musicians OK, tolerable, or even nice-but-nothing-special. But that group (of the ones I don't dislike) is definitely not the same as those that I actually like. There's a huge gap there.

I say that because after using both Pandora (less) and last.fm (more) for a while, I found out that although last.fm fails (gives me music I dislike) much less, Pandora's successes are more intense, even if less common. Last.fm finds a whole lot of stuff that's OK, but Pandora finds some stuff that's awesome.

To me, one new artist I really like is worth hundreds of ones I don't care about.

Re:Pandora rocks

[The_reformant]

I disagree in my view since pandora requires "expert reviewal" of each song to provide meta-data it is only ever going to recommend fairly mainstream bands. When I used my free trial this expectation was borne out.

I also find that for specific sub-genres the meta-data isn't fine grained enough. You start to see bands which personally I would class as very different with almost identical meta-data. This is a problem with the way the reviews are structured. The reviews are performed by expert musicians BUT not necesarily ones which are knowledgeable or experienced in the domain of the tracks they review. Which means if your an avid listener of a genre like say prog-metal you find its recomendations of NWOBHM style bands wholly inappropriate.

Re:Pandora wins

[shadwstalkr]

So what's the point in telling me other bands I might like if I've already over-heard those bands and already know whether or not I like them?

Well it depends on how you want to use the service. If you're just trying to find new music then you're right, there is no point, but I prefer to use streaming radio as background noise. I want mostly songs that I like so I don't have to interrupt what I'm doing to skip, but if there are a lot of new songs I pay more attention to the music than my work. So for me, your description of last.fm (or, in my case, Launchcast's default settings) is perfect.