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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.
I'm sitting here listening to Pandora at work and just as I notice a new Slashdot article, it craps out.
Curse you!
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
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.
>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.