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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.'"
I've tried the two top recommended music recommend-ers: last.fm, and Pandora. Love them both.
I had to futz with the last.fm ergonomics, and find if I haven't used it in a while, I have to re-figure some of the stuff out. I find that annoying. But, it has great features, great recommendations, and features.
Pandora, I found to be easier to use, simpler and more elegant in design. I especially like the "sharing" of your personal stations, and love the "most popular" station feature. This is a great site, and a great experience.
For Pandora, though they've talked about fixing it, and I don't know where they are on this, I was disappointed to not be able to create a Classical Music station. That's a pretty big negative for me.
(Also, if you try Pandora, an odd behavior: if you click the "Minimize" button in the Pandora window (not the browser minimizer), it pops out into its own independent window. That's hardly "minimizing", though I find it convenient.)
And, while these may be free services, they've ended up costing me a small fortune. I've been exposed to so much cool music I'd not heard, I've ended up buying about 20 CDs I'd never have otherwise bought.
Can you answer "Why do radio stations predominantly air really bad, overhyped crap nobody wants to hear?" without using the words "bribe" or any synonyms?
Or rather, will they actually recommend music? Or just the hypecrap?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Pandora can get stuck in a rut when it doesn't understand why you listen to what you're listening to. I'm a big fan of Progressive Rock. Say you start with PFM's (Premiata Forneria Marconi) 'Celebration.' After a few songs it tends to pick some kind of Indy Rock. Progressive Rock may be grandiose, but that's what I like about it, that it continues to change during a piece of music. In essence it, by it's very nature seems to escape the definitions given to it. So I'm not sure that any of these engines will ever get that kind of music right. If I "Don't like' enough songs in a row it will go back for some classic prog, but if left alone it just keeps wandering away from it instead of leading me to new prog like Wobbler or Kenso.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
An inverse metric would work nicely for ranking a video recommendation service.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
What I'm looking for is a site where I can enter or select names of bands or songs that I like, and get independent music recommended to me. You like Alanis Morisette? Try Jen Pitch. That sort of thing. Does anybody know of such sites?
By the way: the example above is just an association I know from the top of my head; I'm not very much into the kind of music at all.
Any service that supports not only FreeBSD, but native amd64 binaries of their client deserves some major kudos. When I get tired of my regular playlists, I tune into last.fm for some fresh stuff, and it does a mostly decent job.
Better living through obfuscation. Project White Noise
I'm sitting here listening to Pandora at work and just as I notice a new Slashdot article, it craps out.
Curse you!
I've been using Clinko for years.
:)
In fact, I wrote it
I like using Last.fm because it's player is open-source and available for both Linux and WinXP. For me, that's critical, because I dualboot my PC between those two OSs, and have my music on a separate partition that's accessible by both.
I'm not sure if that's the case with the other services, but I've been happy with Last.fm
I decided to stop stealing cynical quotes to use as a signature line.
So, seeing as I work at Last.fm (I founded audioscrobbler), I feel obliged to pimp my last.fm journal, which has some interesting stats (imo) about which media players are most popular, and some graphs of artist popularity. I intend to do a "google trends for music" interface after the next site update (see below).
The KDE player Amarok is getting increasingly popular, which is nice to see. I use it myself; the built in support means no plugin is required. The next version of amarok adds lots more last.fm integration too.
Coming up - we'll be running a beta test of a fairly major update to last.fm towards the end of june, and going live with the new version 1st July.
And a random stat: we currently recieve on average 104 submissions per second from audioscrobbler plugins.
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
Can someone explain to me wha is the business model of those services?
:)?
From what I see I download a player where I can play commercial music of the sort I like for free, with CD quality and no ads...
There are Google Ads on the site, but I can just not go on the site and play free music forever... The player doesn't seem to contain ad/spy ware.
Where's the "catch"
GarageBand will do that, with a bit of manual intervention.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Yeah http://www.progarchives.com/ is good! So are http://www.gepr.net/ and http://www.gnosis2000.net/. And if you have your ten league boots on (and lots and lots of energy) try http://www.nearfest.com/. Rest up before the trip & plan a long recovery after. With two bands Friday at the Progressive Legends Showcase, and five (yes five) bands/artists both Saturday and Sunday it can really take a toll.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Don't talk so loud, somebody will notice.
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
I'll start by saying that I'm a huge fan of Last.fm, and have been for years. I'm addicted to the place, and my music collection would be nothing without it. While Last.fm does have a feature where artists are automatically recommended to you, I rarely use it. It's the social aspect of Last.fm that sets it apart. The best way of getting recommendations is just simply asking for them.
I've used Pandora a few times before, and was always disappointed with what it recomended. Results are mixed to say the least—it clearly works better for some types of music than others—and some of the recommendations can be, quite frankly, laughable.
Musicmobs does something similar. I'm not sure about now, but before you were able to export your whole iTunes library (or just one playlist) to XML and upload it to Musicmobs to get recommendations.
I think they got rid of the direct upload feature because it was extremely slow (the iTunes XML file is huge, but can be highly compressed) and they now have a client - Mobster - which will upload your stats. I'm not sure if Mobster allows you to upload just one playlist in place of your library. You can upload a playlist for all to see, but it doesn't (yet) give you recommendations on the playlist. It might be worth checking out, though.
Andrew
>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,
What is the brand of guitar string that you can hear break in the mono lp version of "Help Me, Rhonda"?Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I am a huge fan of the MusicIP MusicMagicMixer application discussed in the pitchforkmedia article. MusicIP does a fantastic job of helping me navigate my own collection since I ripped it into a couple hundred gigs of files. Coupled with SlimServer, I feel like I have the best of everything: Offline, I use MusicIP to create mixes from my own collection and transfer them to my portable player or make a CD. Online, I can stream my own collection with SlimServer playing MusicIP mixes, and when I want to discover new stuff I drop over to Pandora or Last.FM. I was excited to read about something that would have the intelligence to group Heartbreaker with Living Loving Maid, though, which MusicMagicMixer cannot do. That's righteous. But I'd want to be able to turn it off...sometimes it's fun to have Heartbreaker cut into something else. Imagine it being TOO intelligent. It's one thing to have Overture always lead into Temples of Syrinx...it's another to have it always play both discs from The Wall any time it picks Another Brick In The Wall part 2. I agree with the extremetech article about Launchcast, too. Before Pandora and Last.FM, it is where I went online to discover new music. While I still like their ratings system the best of all and feel it is the most intuitive (rate the song and/or the artist and/or the album to shape your station), I think the other services implement moods much better and generally have a more positive user experience.
Some of you already have those cute little shirts on that say disco sucks, right? That's not all that sucks.-Frank Zappa
That is a hardware issue. The question is out of scope.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Anyone else using iRATE? For some reason it isn't listed in the article, but I've been using it for years and it's the best way I've found to (legally) get free tracks from the web and get new ones you like based on how you've rated previous ones.
Yeah, I wanted this too, so me and a buddy created tunebounce.com (free download for mac and pc)
hooray! it's a sex wiki
Last.fm is on the right track, but incomplete. Registered users submit the tracks they play, and the algorithm considers how many plays each artist got. But it doesn't look at a per-song level, just artists. There's no way to tell it which songs you dislike.
This is bad because many of us have bought an album and realized we only liked a few tracks. Yet the big fans of that artist like all the songs, or different ones. Jamiroquai - Virtual Insanity got lots of airplay, but the rest of the album is much slower and disco-y. Consequently, Last.fm is highly unlikely to recommend the artist and of course that song to listeners who missed it six years ago.
Last.fm thinks I should like lots of Radiohead, Coldplay, and The White Stripes because other users who listen to the same artists I do have also listened to those bands a lot. Well I only like a few songs from the first two and really dislike the last band. Too much whining in the vocals. If only Last.fm let me tell it the songs I like and the ones I don't. Then it could find users who also dislike the same music as I. Consequently, it would recommend just songs I'm probably going to like; certain Ska songs by Reel Big Fish and others, certain Rock/Swing by The Cherry Poppin' Daddies and The Brian Setzer Orchestra.
Then I don't have to skip through albums getting annoyed with how much of them I don't like because I'm not a huge Ska or Swing fan.
When I listen to Best of albums by Garth Brooks and Clint Black, along with select Shania Twain, and the Black Dog soundtrack, I should get song recommendations for Travis Tritt that only include the few tracks I'll probably like.
If Last.fm could increase their computing power per user by about 30x, I think it could be recommending all kinds of obscure hits and tracks that users would never think of otherwise and human community members couldn't think of either. After all, I like a bunch of hip-hop and techno too. In fact I have extremely varied musical interests, but probably most people do and they're too stuck in a few genres because there's too much chaff among the wheat to branch out and find the select songs they'll enjoy.