Welcome back, hope your weekend was exciting and productive. Today I’d like to introduce a showdown between two web based streaming audio giants, Pandora & Last.fm.
I have been using both of these services, alternating weekly through the month of January.
Let’s start with Last.fm
Last.fm is a popular Internet radio site for music, founded in 2002. It claims over 30 million active users based in more than 200 countries.[1] On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for £140m ($280m USD).[2]
Using a music recommender system called “Audioscrobbler”, Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user’s musical taste by recording details of the songs the user listens to, either from Internet radio stations, or the user’s computer or many portable music devices. This information is transferred to Last.fm’s database (“scrobbled”) via a plugin installed into the user’s music player. The profile data is then displayed on the user’s profile page. The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play artists similar to the user’s favourites.
Users can create custom radio stations and playlists from any of the audio tracks in Last.fm’s music library, and are able to listen to some individual tracks on demand, or download tracks if the rights holder has previously authorised it. – From Wikipedia
Last.fm is a great service, it provides users a more intimate experience, from artist bios, to fading images of user-uploaded photos of the artist, and of course the ability to skip to the next song or visit the artist’s website.
There aren’t too many things I didn’t like about Last.fm, the page at times bombards you with ads, and most of it is designed in Flash, which hurts when playing and working on the same PC.
Now on to Pandora
Pandora is an automated music recommendation and Internet radio service created by the Music Genome Project. Users enter a song or artist that they enjoy, and the service responds by playing selections that are musically similar. Users provide feedback on approval or disapproval of individual songs, which Pandora takes into account for future selections.
While listening, users are offered the ability to buy the songs or albums at various online retailers. Over 400 different musical attributes are considered when selecting the next song. These 400 attributes are combined into larger groups called focus traits. There are 2,000 focus traits. Examples of these are rhythm syncopation, key tonality, vocal harmonies and displayed instrumental proficiency.
- From Wikipedia
Pandora is what I am using currently while writing this post, and chances are, it’s going to be my go-to streaming web music service. Why you ask? Well, first thing comes to mind is song selection. I was able to find music that isn’t on the radar right now, which is very important to me as much of the music I listen to is; something to be concerned about.
Although great, Pandora isn’t perfect. It also seems to have resolution issues when displaying banner ads, and it limits you to the amount of songs you may skip per hour / day. Of course, it’s a Flash based website, but it seems to load a bit quicker than Last.fm.
Conclusion: I will keep my Last.fm account as I have it connected to Xbox 360 Gamertag, and use it every now and then, but my main service will be Pandora. It’s overall feel, song selection, and resource friendly design will keep it’s hooks into me for a while.
More information on Pandora & Last.FM:
Mashable – Web Music Faceoff
CNET – Pandora Review
Associated Content – Last.FM Review
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