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

[gunpowda]

However, what I've found to be excellent about Pandora, apart from its uncanny ability to play relevant music based on the few clues I've given it, is that the service tells you *why* it's chosen a particular track if you click that button. It's a great insight into some features of the music you may not have consciously picked up on before.

It is true that if your taste is for a niche genre then it won't be too useful, but if you're in that position then you probably know better than any software what you ought to listen to next!