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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."

12 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. Lastfm by danboarder · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Renegade+Lisp · · Score: 4, Informative
    This review is one of the best technical articles I have read in a while. Kudos to the author!

    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).

  4. 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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    1. Re:Pandora and DRM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Last.FM is similiarly trivial to rip.

      Each track is seperated by a string, "SYNC" which the player detects. It's pretty easy to copy the stream, split it into multiple files and automaticaly tag and name them correctly actually. It took me about 20 minutes to hack some Python together to do it.

  5. Perfect timing by xoran99 · · Score: 5, Funny

    This article has perfect timing; I go to Last.fm only to find that their streaming servers are down for upgrades...

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    1. Re:Perfect timing by flaneur · · Score: 5, Informative

      Sigh, indeed...we've been planning this downtime (which involves a major upgrade to our streaming capabilities) for weeks now, so it would figure that we would get Slashdotted at precisely this moment!

      We're also busy readying some cool new features to be released by the end of the week...subscribers will also have access to a beta site (beta.last.fm) later today to try out some of these new goodies.

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      http://www.last.fm/user/flaneur

  6. 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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  7. Last.fm worked out the kinks by TheMotedOne · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.)

  8. Similar but different... by Eythian · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...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.

  9. 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.