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."

That reminds me

[PunkOfLinux]

Last.fm is great. Especially when you leave the same album, with only 12-13 tracks, running for days on end. It's fun!

seriously, I think Last.fm has a serious advantage, mostly because there's plug-ins for Linux media players. Heck, amaroK [kde.org] has built in support for it. So, until Pandora has that kind of 'market share' Last.fm will be way better, at least in my eyes.

Pandora and DRM

[JackDW]

Pandora's service is DRM-free - they just send you 128kbit MP3s, which you can easily copy using (for instance) tcpflow. I discovered this the other day while trying to figure out a good way to record the songs I liked. Another interesting thing about the service is each "station" only appears to play about a gigabyte of music (compressed). About half the tracks I've captured have been played at least twice.

Last.fm marketing

[mwvdlee]

It seems to me that it wouldn't be hard for some evil record company to promote a new song by simply sending bogus info to Last.fm; setup a few thousand accounts, let each account send info indicating playing that particular song and a few others (either targeted to a demographic or randomly, as to properly annoy everybody) all day long.

Re:Leakage

[space_dude_27]

When I checked Last.fm's similar artists to the reggae legend Bob Marley, first on the list was James Brown, followed by The Chemical Brothers, then Aerosmith.

All that this indicates is that a lot of people who listen to Bob Marley also happen to listen to James Brown etc. That's how last.fm works, as far as I understand - it recommends stuff based on what other people listen to. If fans of artist A also listen to artist B then it makes the link between the two and recommends artist B to all fans of artist A. I think that if last.fm started trying to exclude stuff because eg: "Bob Marley fans are never going to want to listen to The Chemical Brothers!" then they'd be missing a trick if their data clearly show that a lot of people *do* listen to both.

Recommending Aerosmith to Bob Marley fans is like recommending Slayer to Beach Boys fans.

Again, if a lot of last.fm users listened to The Beach Boys and Slayer then yes, it would make that recommendation.

Re:Lastfm

[wwwrench]

Do people remember the similarities engine [whiteis.com]? That was really incredible, and I got a lot of music suggestions from there. You would enter three bands you liked, and then it would give you a whole list of recommendations. It was very simple, it just built its list of recommendations by using the list of three bands that other people had entered. As I understand it, the patent for this is now owned by Microsoft. Would be interested to know whether they are using it to kill other websites like the similarities engine (that particular website had to close once they sold the algorithm). A good example of a stupid patent. Haven't RTFA, so perhaps last.fm uses a similar idea for their algorithms, and I am just talking out of my ass.

2 Downloads for LastFM

[altp]

First thing after singing up on lastfm it told me to download 2 applications. A player and a application that sends songs that I play via itunes back to them.

No thanks. I'll stick with pandora.

After spending some time rating songs as likes and dislikes it has done fine for me.

Re:Last.fm marketing

[Renegade Lisp]

It seems to me that it wouldn't be hard for some evil record company to promote a new song by simply sending bogus info to Last.fm; setup a few thousand accounts, let each account send info indicating playing that particular song and a few others (either targeted to a demographic or randomly, as to properly annoy everybody) all day long.

They have pretty good spam protection as far as I know (and this is a form of spam), though I don't know the details. It's not very different from every other blog on the net which also faces similar problems.

Re:Last.fm marketing

[Jugalator]

... and that record company (easy enough to find out which from the music that's played) would gain a ton of negative publicity in the process for ruining the point with the service. :-)

Re:That reminds me

[MatthewHays]

Have been using LastFm for a week or so now. But why doesn't it just download my entire iTunes playlist and build my profile from that (that contains tons of useful info, play counts, last played, my rating etc etc)? It would result in my profile being built far faster and being more complete. The more info they get from me the better. I basically just want them to find peoples playlists that have a high correlation to mine and show/play me the songs that they have that I dont. Nothing more complex than that really..

Pandora wins

[gothzilla]

The author missed so much about these services that I'm betting he was paid to push one over the other.
There is one massive difference between the two that has been overlooked. When you put an artist into Last.fm, you get a list of bands. Okay. Good enough. Look at the bands. I typed in "Garbage" and all the bands at the top were bands who's songs have been overplayed on radio for a while, meaning I already know who they are. Thanks anyway.

#18 was the first band I hadn't heard of. I checked them out and didn't like them so I moved on. #30 was next and by them I'm already down to only a 50% match. So tell me how does a service help if the only recommendations it has are bands I already know I like or don't like? How does this help if the only bands on it that I've never heard of are matched below 50%

Putting "Garbage" into Pandora and I got a band I'd never heard of on the 3rd song. Put in Garbage again and totally different songs come up. Type in Garbage again Last.fm and what do you get? The exact same list.

I decided to try a totally different band. I typed in Wumpscut. Here again, I already know all these bands and the first band I haven't heard is way down at 53% again. This doesn't help me because down there the bands sound totally different than the one I typed in.

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? Why give me the exact same list every time? I did't like the first one I want another. Pandora creates a true mix and exposes far more unknown music than Last.fm does.

I use both...

[Errandboy of Doom]

Here's [thelongtail.com] a good (extremely quick) breakdown of where they fit in conceptually.

I suspect statistics will triumph over design, no matter how knowledgeable a group of musicologists you assemble. At the very least, statistics can do it faster and easier, because it skips the messy aesthetic questions and cuts right to behavior of peers (objective data).

One example of this efficiency in action: Pandora has been struggling to include latin and classical music. Last.fm doesn't care if you listen to white noise all day long (as long as someone else is too).

Pandora can behave unhelpfully if you program a station with a bunch of genre crossing interests (I've found that I have to compartmentalize my tastes into subgenres for Pandora to behave sensibly).

But Pandora lets me compartmentalize my tastes for more accuracy. The Last.fm algorithm gets diluted by my punk interests when recommending new funk for me to listen to, and vice versa.

And sometimes, when you're looking for recommendations, sometimes you don't just want to follow the crowd. Sometimes you want the help of an expert whose taste you admire, and sometimes you want something completely random.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to create a station on Pandora using your top artists of the week in Last.fm automatically? Wouldn't it be great to import all your distates from Pandora into Last.fm?

Who's got a script to hybridize these two, make them greater than the sum of their parts?

Re:Pandora wins

[dmitrig]

Pretty much by definition, songs around the 50% mark are those that will take you out of your current musical comfort zone. That's a good thing. Think of the top of the list as confirming (if you generally like them) the validity of the lower part.