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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."
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 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.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Both are great, but LastFM plays in Winamp and other players, while Pandora requires Flash in a webpage... so I prefer Lastfm. Related: www.TubesMusic.com will soon let users do either one when it's available, so I've heard.
I've played with both services as well, and I have now been a happy (and paying) last.fm user for several months. I don't quite share the author's enthusiasm about Pandora; in my case (and for some of the friends I tried it for), its recommendations were not quite that good.
The centralized music genome inventory that Pandora relies on reminds me of a Cathedral, while Last.fm is more like a Bazaar of babbling voices -- now I wonder where that metaphor comes from!
I think Last.fm has more potential because it is fundamentally a social service -- it feels a lot more like other open online communities I have come to know and love, whereas Pandora seems more like a black-box to me (something the review author also mentioned).
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.
You're an immobile computer, remember?
This article has perfect timing; I go to Last.fm only to find that their streaming servers are down for upgrades...
Karma: Bad (mostly due to all those "In Soviet Russia" jokes)
I use amaroK and it works wonderfully well !!
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. -Nathaniel Lee
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.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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.
huh?
Why would Last.fm choose those particular artists? Why not look at the record label, country of origin, style and similar artists? I know they don't want to get 'locked in' to a certain pattern but this is a bit off.
Recommending Aerosmith to Bob Marley fans is like recommending Slayer to Beach Boys fans.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Back in the days of audioscrobbler there were frequent days and even weeks when the servers would be slow and sometimes even not record data sent, but since the swap of domain and name to last.fm it seems that they have worked out all the kinks. foobar2000 and last.fm work splendid on my windows box. I just wish there was some way to have two different plugins report to the same account. (Even if that led to abusing tags.)
...to each of these, is iRATE radio which uses collaberative filtering and user ranking of tracks to give you freely available music that you (hopefully) like.
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.
Pandora is much easier to use for dumb people like me so I prefer that
It would be nice if /. posts could briefly introduce what the hell they're talking about...
Me, I don't have the slightest idea of what pandora or last.fm are.
If you like those services then you might like www.music-map.com
It's never too late to stop doing something wrong, or to start doing something right.
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.
As a user of Last.fm for a while now, I must say I quite enjoy the charts and the hookups to other users. I have the same problems as the author with its recommendations - but Last.fm seems to be aware of that problem too.
Users receive personalized recommendations based on what they've played and last.fm has implemented a cool little interface that lets you choose between how popular or obscure your recommendations. For me, that seems to cut down on the misplaced music genere problem and actually generates music that I might actually listen to.
The trick is to implement a similar filter for all recommendations, maybe in addition to a filter based on tags (which last.fm supports). I think the idea behind last.fm is good, it just needs to be tweaked a little bit.
(I was only an egg, but then I cracked)
People who like it, well like it, the rest well just skip over it, the more you skip over it the further you get from the people who like it and the record company, the fewer times you hear anything weighted by them.
Deleted
There is no competition. Social networks (like del.icio.us for websites) has shown us they're more reliable in the end. last.fm just needs a wider userbase and all our music knowledge are belong to them.
speaking of the social aspect of the service, there is a group for readers of slashdot at last.fm. i started it back when audioscrobbler first allowed groups, and there are 277 members as i type this. the charts reveal us as a crowd who do not diverge in a significant way from the rest of the last.fm population, which stands to reason, as at this point last.fm still attracts mostly geeky techie folk.
"Life is great; without it, you'd be dead." -Harmony Korine
I just went to Pandora's website and entered William Shatner as my starting artist and I got Scott Walker, Ulysses, and shocking as it may seem William Shatner. I got a kick out of their description of William Shatner's music though :-)
Candle burns its brightest in the dark
Okay I have a question someone on slashdot must know the answer to...
Is anyone aware of how pandora determines the attributes of a particular song before it recommends it?
Are they manually tagged by a human 'expert' or is there any automated algorithm that analyses the music?
Now if pandora does utilize human experts surely pandora is going to come under enormous logistical pressure as its remit expands, whereas a social network like Last.fm will flourish?
It left out one of the biggest players -- Yahoo's Launchcast service.
I have been using this service for the last 4 years, and it's helped me to discover LOTS of new bands and songs that I prior would not have known about. I simply click on how much I like an artist, and so it plays more songs from that artist or songs from similar artists. I can rate albums, songs, and artists themselves, so I am getting results based on how an album sounds, a song sounds, or an artist in general.
So yea, Last.Fm is cool and all, but for those of us on the Launch bandwagon for so many years, it's hardly revolutionary.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I've had a lot of luck with Pandora, but the downside is they want me to use a bare bones web-based player. What's their long term plan, to reinvent the wheel and evolve their own player? Pandora is a nice app for generating recommendations, but I couldn't imagine paying for it as is, since the player is way primitive and you can't get at the recommendation engine without listening to everything.
I'd rather have an interface into Pandora's recommendation engine directly without the pretense of actually listening to everything they recommend. As is, I often let it run muted while I listen to other music, checking what they recommend every so often on Napster.
Pandora is better because it more readily bypasses corporate firewalls meant to prevent your music enjoyment.
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.
I haven't ever used last.fm, but I've played around with Pandora and like it. But, the author makes the same mistake I see everyone that uses Pandora do at first - entering an artist to seed the station. Because Pandora's algorithms work at the song level, you get much better / more consistent results putting in a favorite song or two from a particular artist than their name.
1. Excellent concept
2. Excellent database of obscure music artists. Any name I threw at them, there was an entry for it. I even uploaded some album pics
3. Friendly community
and now the bad.
1. The last.fm player is horrible. Horrible usability, and often I just get nothing for music. Can't use it at work. Prior buggy version muted itself unless you gave it exclusive focus.
2. The audioscrobbler plug-in often refuses to handshake.
3. The combination of both is a bit obfuscated.
4. You see just how badly tagged Mp3s across the world are. You often find the wrong tracks, or 20 similarly-named tracks of the same song for an artist. Not last.fm's fault, but it would be nice someday to fuzzy logic them together.
5. A bit bureaucratic in getting artist images uploaded. If it's an unpopular artist, it will never get the # of votes needed to surface.
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.
It's in the print edition hitting mailboxes right now. It mentions Pandora, last.fm, and three others. It hit their website yesterday.
Here's 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?
...to integrate the two?
Can we get a greasemonkey script or something to take our top artists from Last.fm and build a station on Pandora?
Alternatively, I wish I could specify my distaste for certain artists in Last.fm...
Ever download songs from a P2P network? Songs that were tagged wrong, like any comedy song labelled Weird Al Yankovic? Or 90% of Talking Heads songs labelled Devo?
The same problem applies to Last FM. I do lots of searching around for weird and obscure music, and all too often one of the highest Google hits will be a page on Last FM that's simply wrong.
eg. The Crystal Method did not do a version of "Carol Of The Bells," TomAndAndy did. Once again, a potentially useful tool gets polluted by bad data and ignorant users.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
These services are great but once you found new music, you can't listen it. You first have to go to the shop and if you're lucky, you will find it (but more probably you won't). OTOH, there is plenty of legal free music on the internet, distributed by artists and labels. So why not to pick it?
DJRate just implements this idea. Still alpha but it works. You can find music by tags or by profile comparaison. Simple but efficient. And each time one adds a link, every one benefits. (end yes, more info about the artists will be added)
Million Dollar Screenshot
For those who's tried Yahoo's service this may seem odd since it only works in Internet Explorer as it's ActiveX based and it contains annoying adverts for most people, but at least it's still community driven as Last.FM is
The reason why I stick with launch is because all the music is normalized to ONE level. I don't understand why the other services haven't done this. It's so annoying to constantly change the volume up and down.
Erm, thats the whole point! You can use last.fm without sending them your song info... but it would be fairly pointless... as they base their radio stations and recommendations on the songs you listen to.
There is a freestanding radio player if you don't want to install it. But the audioscrobbler plugin is the whole point of the service. I think its even integrated into newer versions of xbox media centre.
It takes a while to work out the kinks and build a good profile i'm really liking the service after a few weeks using it... and the fact you have a page that shows what you listen to, and can use it to build cool forum sigs showing your recent fave songs is great too.
BTW/ the players have an option NOT to send songs to fast.fm (for trying out new random stuff) and you can always delete songs from your profile (if your sister has been listening to britney behind your back!)
Which is why it has limited benefit...if the record companies don't want you to try the music they designate as music you can try, you can't. This is were intellectual property leads - you can't play songs for friends who might want to buy it if they like it.
Advice: on VPS providers
When I tried Pandora and Last, I discovered that Last has all those obscure bands were right there where I wanted them.
They've got verything from British avant-rock pioneers This Heat to Japanese underground legend Keiji Haino with stops at New Zealand (Straightjacket Fits and Look Blue Go Purple) and '70s Germany (Faust, Can, and Popol Vuh).
So I'm probably sticking with Last, though I've encountered a few problems (wonky Windows player, repeating tracks on "similar artist stations," etc.)
Deep in the ocean are treasures beyond compare; but if you seek safety, it is on the shore.
Amber MacArthur did a nice interview with the creator of Pandora. The creator explains his motivation, and the strengths behind his methodology. It may not be the "ideal" solution, but I personally don't think there is such a thing. The two most salient elements of the Pandora service include:
a) Since it was created by someone who was a member of one of those "new" bands pining for recognition, he understands the importance of what he's doing.
b)Just as you might suspect, once these kinds of services start becoming popular, you've got the RIAA offering cash in exchange for bias (the same kind of garbage now regularly undertaken by radio stations). He has stated that he wants no part of this...his mission is to allow people to discover new music, not to "present" them whatever happens to be in a queue of someone else's making.
It seems to me that whatever shortfalls Pandora might have, it comes much closer to fulfilling its stated objective - that of allowing users to discover new music - than services relying on others recommendations, since "recommendations" can be tainted in any number of ways.
Last.FM is similiarly trivial to rip.
To help out those of us who are not so savvy with such things, please post your script! I thought about trying to do this but was stumpted as to how.
Pandoera is a service where music from pandoras experts is pushed to you based on Pandoras criterion .
Last FM is a tagging service based on user recomendations so it can be consdered to be a pull service .
Can't believe I posted the same thing within minutes of the other...
I wasn't trying to spam, I was just distracted, or maybe I'm just trapped in a "mental time warp."
On the other hand, maybe I'm just trapped in a "mental time warp."
I just got done writing a paper on this. Pretty interesting stuff. About the best source I found online for CFs was
Out of those papers I found the ideas in Collaborative Filtering with Privacy (2002), by John Canny (Computer Science Division, UC Berkeley) the most interesting. It talks about using homomorphic encryption to store a public profile. Pretty sweet.
I have been a last.fm user for many months and I just tried Pandora on reading this article. One of my big problems with last.fm was how inconsistent and meaningless its recommendations were. I had a punk chick over here the other day and considering she was a sex pistols fan and I had no sex pistols on my computer I tried last.fm and it kept playing songs that were embarrassingly unrelated to the sex pistols. I just tried Pandora with Nirvana and I like what I hear so far.
I have not used last.fm yet, but it reminds me of Launchcast I think thouse social recommendation things are pretty good for giving you what you already have. No doubt: Launchcast learns your taste in music, like Amazon learns your taste and it does a good job. I cant complain too much. It learned from me for about 2 years at least now, and i cant remember when i last had a really bad song that i had to skip.
Launchcast is also good for targetted music discovery. Example: I want to aquire a taste in Jazz and listen often to this station now and give the stars, rating it. Slowly but with force my own station moves and adapts.
Pandora has a much more different strength. Here i get to discover new things without a plan. Based on its different approach it can make an other kind of guesses wich music of unknown interprets is to my taste, even though i usually am not in that kind of music.
According to prophecy
Both services seem to forget tempo when calculating. So when I enter a dancey song, I'm fed 400 songs that are similar, but are slow or midtempo snore-fests.
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
You're not alone. I despise that word, too, and refuse to use it. If absolutely necessary I will say "weblog".
Interesting - I poked around the iRate site for about fifteen minutes unable to figure out how to download it until I noticed that the guide to installing it mentioned the home page (broken link on that page to the home page, but I could figure THAT out.) The home page had a suspiciously large blank area in the middle, but a mouse-over told me that there was something there.
Turns out that the installation image doesn't show under Opera (even if I identify as "IE", but does under IE. Anyone else notice?
I'm still going to give it a whirl.
You know, the site that has being doing this sort of stuff for years, and was bought by Yahoo? How about comparing them to these (newer?) sites? Although, it is windows only, and the sound quality kind of sucks, even on high.
When you find a new artist,
- its easy to see if the track you like is the only good one on the album, or if the album is consistenly listened to.
- it's easy to see which is the most listened to album by an artist. so that you can buy that one first and see if you like it
Also it is best to use the player in discovery mode, otherwise it repeats very often.
I just checked out pandora and it seems to work well, but I would still check last.fm to see whether their albums were consistently listened too before buying.
Oh, weird. It shows up in Firefox fine. Although I think there should be a clearer link to the downloadable versions (which are on the sf project page). I'll chase that up now. Cheers.
The thing I miss from Pandora is the ability to explore their database without listening to the music.
Broadband is not free in New Zealand. Most broadband plans here are capped at a few gigabytes a month of traffic. I'd prefer not to spend all day pulling down a megabyte a minute just to explore new music...
With last.fm (and its predecessor Audioscrobbler), I can explore the similar artist lists. Or, I can find someone with similar tastes to myself and see what they are listening to. Or, I can pick an artist, find a fan of that artist, and look at their play history. Then I can wander to the library and borrow some CDs.
Much lower bandwidth, and it works well, but because of the problems people have raised with last.fm, I'd like to be able to do the same thing with Pandora...
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
Heh, bit late but I wrote a journal at last.fm on why last.fm is better than Pandora: journal here
Here's another music recommender, named Foafing the Music. Its based on user listening habits (tracked from Audioscrobbler/last.fm) and user profiling (from the user's FOAF profile -e.g LiveJournal, Tribe.net, my.opera.com, or directly from a user account in www.blogger.com).
Although its still more focused on the research, it has a lot of interesting stuff in it, for instance the system recommends to the user:
Cheers, Oscar.