Music Recommendation Engines Compared

An anonymous reader writes "The music recommendation/music discovery space seems to be heating up this year. Two big recent features on music recommendation engines: ExtremeTech has a round-up and reviews of eight leading services. Of the eight, Last.fm emerges as the winner: "Last.fm is by far the best out there, possessing a huge library of music, a great community, and a recommendation feature that will blow you away." Meanwhile, Pitchforkmedia.com just ran an in-depth feature about the hows and whys of music recommendation software, that tells the story going back to the '90s, and interviews people at Last.fm, Pandora, MusicIP, and the startup Echo Nest: '"Our hope is to answer every possible question about music that ever existed. If we can pull that off, then I think we're doing very well," says [Brian] Whitman.'"

Comments

Re:Stuck in the Indy Shuffle with Pandora

[Otter]

One of the things I like about Pandora (although it probably won't solve your problem) is that you can have it tell you why it chose a particular song. If you're really looking to outsmart it, you can take a look at those and try to finetune your preferences.

My one gripe is that it pulls multiple similar songs -- I have one station with all my likes tossed together, and it always plays fou or five dancehall songs followed by four or five hair metal songs followed by.... I suppose it's some sort of optimization to reduce the number of queries, or something like that.

By the way, does Pandora actually have advertising? I've never heard any. Have they not brought it online yet?

Re:You laugh, but that'd be the feature for me

[Otter]

GarageBand will do that, with a bit of manual intervention.

Shhh

[idonthack]

Don't talk so loud, somebody will notice.