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Comparison of Pandora and Last.fm

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the tell-me-what-i-like dept.

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."

5 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. That reminds me by PunkOfLinux · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:That reminds me by MatthewHays · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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..

  2. Pandora and DRM by JackDW · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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  3. Last.fm marketing by mwvdlee · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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  4. Re:Leakage by space_dude_27 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.