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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)
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The moral of the story is that Pandora tried to give you a clue and improve your taste in music...
I suspect that what's happening here is that data from Audioscrobbler ("what tracks are like / liked by people who like other tracks") is there but the actual track that you're after isn't yet, for example:
+ of+Old+England
http://www.last.fm/music/Les+Barker/_/Hard+Cheese
Ones that are have a "preview" button, like this one:
http://www.last.fm/music/Runrig/_/Ribhinn+Donn
(to take the example of what happens to be playing at the moment).