Pandora vs. Last.fm

I have had literally dozens of emails from people I know, people who read my blog, friends in the venture business, all recommending Pandora for music disocvery.

Pandora was created by the music genome project and you tell it about some music you like and its starts playing music.  Kind of like a personal radio station on your computer.  Sounds great right?  Well everyone seems to love it but me.

I tried it when it first came out, I even paid for a year in advance (something you don't have to do anymore).  I killed it within 10 minutes.  It just wasn't coming up with stuff I wanted to listen to.

About every five emails I get suggesting I try Pandora, I give it another try.  But it's always the same.  I just can't get into it.

Contrast that with Last.fm.  I absolutely love Last.fm.  I started out using last.fm (in its incarnation as audioscrobbler) to spy on my music listening habits and report them to me and others.  You will see some of that data on the left sidebar of my blog in the big red badges.  They show what I listened to the most last week and the music I have listened to the most since I started using last.fm.

Then slowly but surely I got sucked into the system.  First it was the social networking.  I found some friends of mine in the service and connected to them.  I check out what they are listening to via last.fm.  And I've found people I've never met in last.fm who have similar taste in music to me.

For some reason, I was never compelled to download the last.fm player.  I have iTunes, Rhapsody , and emusic and that gives me a fair amount of leeway to sample whatever music I want to check out on my computer.  But several weeks ago, I downloaded the last.fm player.

You can listen to personal radio which is based on the music you have listened to.  You can listen to neighbor radio which is based on the music your neighbors (people with similar taste to yours) listen to.  Or you can listen to "loved tracks" radio which is based on the music you've tagged as "love this track".

I generally listen to neighbor radio and I have been blown away by this service.  I get music I really enjoy all the time, but its often music I have never heard or music that I have heard and really love.

Last.fm is great.  It requires a number of things from you.  First, that you listen to a lot of music on your computer.  If you don't there is no way for last.fm to capture your music listening data.  Second, that you download the plugin so that they can in fact capture your music listenting data.  And third, that you are interested in an online social experience for discovering music.

Pandora is a lot simpler and maybe that's why people like it so much. But for me, last.fm is a lot better.  I don't want a computer recommending music to me.  I want other people, people who share my taste in music, recommending music to me.

Comments

[ian c rogers]

Yahoo! decided to throw its hat in this ring. Here's the post.

http://ymusicblog.com/blog/2006/02/10/yahoo-music-personalization-primer-pandora-lastfm-soundflavor/

[Seth]

I use both services regularly and love them both for what they are. If I'm looking for a certain type of music, I find Pandora to be much more reliable. Mistagging on last.fm is rampant, which makes it challenging to find things within the same genre sometimes. The music genome project makes Pandora much more dependable in this area. I also find that, contrary to some complaints above, if I add several songs or artists to a Pandora station, I can actually create a varied music experience.

But I still love last.fm for all its great chart, tagging, and social networking features. And as others have mentioned, when I'm feeling adventurous, neighbor radio is a great way to find musical styles I'd never go seek out on my own.

As far as I'm concerned, they're two very different services, each with their own advantages and drawbacks. I don't see this as a "versus" or "either/or" issue.

Oh, and if anyone's interested, you might want to try the PandoraFM mashup at http://pandorafm.real-ity.com. It does require a last.fm user ID.

[rodzhers]

In my subjective opinion, I believe that pandora has far better 'similar artists' service. In last.fm many bands, whose musical style has changed over the years, have so differently musically orriented similar artists.

Perfect example is last.fm similar artists of "Depeche Mode". Similarity shows itself not just in music but in different factors - fashion, lyrics, history...

But Pandora is just about music..

By the way, I use both of them and I express gratitude to developers of these services..

[Steve Pavlik]

Mike Orren, last.fm actually does have a program that takes your Ipod played songs and uploads it to your database! It's called Isproggler. Hopefully you return to this page in the future.

[Karma]

I find that Pandora works best when you start simple. Give it a song rather than a band. Keep music from radically different genres on separate stations. Pandora won't know what to do with a station that has both the Chemical Brothers and Ani Difranco. I do find that I have to monitor and maintain Pandora every hour or so when it will throw something a little "off" my way. But I like this. It's like Pandora is testing me: let's give her something with more of a [dance beat, acoustic section, etc]. Using the above parameters, Pandora has introduced me to fantastic new music.

[Karma]

I find that Pandora works best when you start simple. Give it a song rather than a band. Keep music from radically different genres on separate stations. Pandora won't know what to do with a station that has both the Chemical Brothers and Ani Difranco. I do find that I have to monitor and maintain Pandora every hour or so when it will throw something a little "off" my way. But I like this. It's like Pandora is testing me: let's give her something with more of a [dance beat, acoustic section, etc]. Using the above parameters, Pandora has introduced me to fantastic new music.

[tsila]

Hi! I have a fantastic new video I'd like to recommend to everyone. The singer has a beautiful voice and the melody is so inspiring.Please help me get this to eveyone!How do I do it?
tsila

[mykel]

Anyone who scrolls down this far should definitely check out the service I work on... It's called finetune... we've been described as the love-child of pandora and last.fm... truth is we use a variety of approaches to determine relatedness among artists... some tags, some data mining, some genre mining, etc... it's also free. Shameless plug.

[Hornswaggled]

As many comments have mentioned: I have had exactly the opposite experience. I keep trying to use last.fm but always end up using Pandora. Maybe this is a Yin and Yang battle.

[Raugust]

As many users above have said, I had pretty much the opposite experience: I used last.fm for several years and, although I enjoyed its song-tracking system, I never got any songs I liked from it. I've also used numerous other song-rating systems online that are also based on aggregate user information, like Yahoo!s launch.com site. All have gotten mixed results (though that one got better results than last.fm, but I dropped it because of the ads and the lack of community). I then tried pandora, not expecting to get much out of it (it sounded like one of those "good idea in theory, but unlikely to work in practice" things), and was absolutely blown away by its awesome. It not only consistently gave me songs I loved, but also greatly expanded my knowledge and understanding of music, and consistently exposed me to songs and artists I never would have tried or learned about otherwise (including my current favorite artist, Regina Spektor) and of what aspects of songs tend to "resonate" with me; on its own, it almost made me want to take a music theory class just to understand the concepts better. Although it has some problems (like a deficit of classical and world music), Pandora is an incredible accomplishment.

Of course, Pandora gets mixed results depending on the person involved. 8 out of 10 of the people I've linked Pandora to have been extremely surprised and impressed by the results, but for others it hasn't clicked; I think this is largely because any music-recommending system will only work for people with certain types of tastes, and even then only to an extent. So, one type of person might be best-suited for something like last.fm, while another might be best-suited for something like Pandora. It seems to me that someone who tends to have more predictable, "mainstream" (even if only mainstream within a certain subculture), genre-oriented tastes is most likely to be benefited by last.fm, since last.fm-style sites rely on the assumption that your tastes will be similar to the tastes of everyone else who has some songs in common with you. last.fm is thus at its strongest when this assumption is as close to reality as possible: when your musical tastes are very comparable to other users'. This is probably why last.fm has gotten such poor results for many people, myself included: my tastes are very eclectic and strange, and it is hard to predict what I will like based on what other users like. Just because I like the Beatles doesn't mean I'll necessarily like Oasis or Radiohead. So, this systemic problem in last.fm and similar sites makes it of limited use.

Pandora, in contrast, while also having limited use, has an extremely different method which will thus give superior results to a different group of music listeners: people who tend to like songs (albeit usually subconsciously) based on specific elements within songs, rather than based on conventional stylistic groupings. For example, suppose you like Bob Dylan not because you like folk music (or even a certain strain of folk music), but because you like a certain element of his instrumentation, vocalization, lyrical content, or metre? If so, then Pandora is likely to be able to recommend other artists you'd like who have similar characteristics, whereas last.fm is almost sure to fail in that respect. Although Pandora does account for genres (usually calling them "influences", and judging them on a song-by-song rather than artist-by-artist basis), this is a relatively minor aspect of the overall Music Genome Project, so it is to be expected that Pandora will expose you to a lot of whole ranges, styles, and genres of music that you would never have heard of if you'd stuck solely to the user-based last.fm system. So, both systems have their virtues, and their vices; which system suits you better will be based more on your own specific aesthetic leanings rather than on any sort of objective superiority of one system over the other.

Also, it should be noted that "The problem is music is effective based on a listener's emotional response to it, not their intellectual response to it." is not a very good criticism of Pandora, because it fails to account for the fact that emotional responses are often based on specific "cues" just as much as intellectual responses are. Just because emotions aren't intellectual or "solid" doesn't mean that they are never causally connected to specific experiences, patterns of which can certainly be studied. Pandora doesn't try to study emotions directly, because doing so would be too subjective; what it does do is study the elements of music which are most likely to provoke emotions. Someone can (and many people do) react to a certain element without even knowing what that element is, so it's false to say that Pandora requires that you intellectualize, or even coherently describe, your music tastes; Pandora itself handles that job, all on its own. For example, I find that I often have a strong emotional reaction to dramatic embedded string sections in songs; I never knew that before using Pandora, yet nevertheless felt the emotional reaction regularly when I heard that specific sound in completely unrelated songs. Pandora identifies such patterns in one's song tastes and capitalizes on them in order to suggest songs with similar elements, based on the assumption that someone who loves 10 songs with element X is likely to like another song with element X; just as last.fm refines itself gradually over time by hearing you play more songs, so does Pandora refine itself via a more direct route: it suggests songs that will give it the most information regarding which elements illicit positive reactions from you, and which do not. As I said above, this sort of system isn't for everyone, but its remarkable success for most people testifies to the fact that just because people's reactions to songs are emotional, doesn't mean that they aren't based on various specific, studyable characteristics of songs.

Incidentally, I continue to use both last.fm and Pandora. But I primarily use the former for socializing and tracking my song records, and the latter for actual song recommendations. Having used last.fm (originally as Audioscrobbler) for many years now and racked up over 13,000 plays, it's safe to say at this point that its ratings are never going to be very useful to me for finding new artists and songs I love.

[Camaris]

Here's another music dicovery website.
You can enter an artist name and it will give you a 'tag cloud' of similar artists. It's an easy way to find bands you haven't discovered yet !

http://artistcloud.camaris.be

[mac]

it seems that in last.fm also you can find tendencies. Its really hard sometimes to find different music, other... well anyway.. i tried to put different radio tags.. and sometimes i just keep getting same artists/songs all the time.. same songs.. so i guess its "bugged" in a way.. that it is.

[Nicholas Barry]

Thanks for the great post. Do you have any idea whether Last.fm's data collection includes how iTunes songs are rated? I have meticulously rated all my songs over time, and I would hope Last.fm makes use of this data. That would obviously allow more accurate suggestions than just looking at play counts, especially since I usually listen to my library on shuffle.