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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."

7 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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  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. 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.

  4. 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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  5. 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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