Pandora vs. Last.fm

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Pandora vs. Last.fm

I have had literally dozens of emails from people I know, people who read my blog, friends in the venture business, all recommending Pandora for music disocvery.

Pandora was created by the music genome project and you tell it about some music you like and its starts playing music. Kind of like a personal radio station on your computer. Sounds great right? Well everyone seems to love it but me.

I tried it when it first came out, I even paid for a year in advance (something you don't have to do anymore). I killed it within 10 minutes. It just wasn't coming up with stuff I wanted to listen to.

About every five emails I get suggesting I try Pandora, I give it another try. But it's always the same. I just can't get into it.

Contrast that with Last.fm. I absolutely love Last.fm. I started out using last.fm (in its incarnation as audioscrobbler) to spy on my music listening habits and report them to me and others. You will see some of that data on the left sidebar of my blog in the big red badges. They show what I listened to the most last week and the music I have listened to the most since I started using last.fm.

Then slowly but surely I got sucked into the system. First it was the social networking. I found some friends of mine in the service and connected to them. I check out what they are listening to via last.fm. And I've found people I've never met in last.fm who have similar taste in music to me.

For some reason, I was never compelled to download the last.fm player. I have iTunes, Rhapsody , and emusic and that gives me a fair amount of leeway to sample whatever music I want to check out on my computer. But several weeks ago, I downloaded the last.fm player.

You can listen to personal radio which is based on the music you have listened to. You can listen to neighbor radio which is based on the music your neighbors (people with similar taste to yours) listen to. Or you can listen to "loved tracks" radio which is based on the music you've tagged as "love this track".

I generally listen to neighbor radio and I have been blown away by this service. I get music I really enjoy all the time, but its often music I have never heard or music that I have heard and really love.

Last.fm is great. It requires a number of things from you. First, that you listen to a lot of music on your computer. If you don't there is no way for last.fm to capture your music listening data. Second, that you download the plugin so that they can in fact capture your music listenting data. And third, that you are interested in an online social experience for discovering music.

Pandora is a lot simpler and maybe that's why people like it so much. But for me, last.fm is a lot better. I don't want a computer recommending music to me. I want other people, people who share my taste in music, recommending music to me.

January 23, 2006 My Music , Venture Capital and Technology | Comments (37) | TrackBack (11)

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Comments

nice ;)
you should try out the similar artist radio (radio link on artist page) or your personal recommendation radio (pony) in addition to the radio modes you mentioned. this way i found a lot of new (and amazing) artists i never heard of before.
rock'n'roll!

Posted by: mischa | Jan 23, 2006 7:34:57 AM

Ultimately the problem with Pandora is they're trying to algorithmically define music. The problem is music is effective based on a listener's emotional response to it, not their intellectual response to it.

I'm guessing the genome project doesn't have a field in their database for anything as fuzzy as how the music makes you feel.

Posted by: Erik | Jan 23, 2006 7:52:44 AM

Interesting experience, completely the opposite of mine.

I'm w/ the pro-Pandora folks. I think it's great. In fact, it's the first recommendation engine of any sort that has been a positive experience for me, the first one that actually returns music that seems contextually relevant and enjoyable, the first one that doesn't appear to be a crude, kludgey piece of software that does nothing more than track other users (because its recommendations are based on an analysis of the music, not of the behavior of the end users).

It seems like the difference in the two services and in our two experiences is that Pandora is based on music to music comparisons while last.fm is based on user to user comparisons. Personally I've never had much use for social networking software (I'm constantly signing up for these things and never using them even a single day). Nor have I had musch use for Amazon-style recommendation engines that base recommendations on like-buying patterns among end users. But Pandora's approach--based on musical characteristics--is enormously useful to me.

Posted by: Jason Chervokas | Jan 23, 2006 8:50:26 AM

Fred-

Interesting, and completely opposite from my experience.

I love Pandora. In fact, it's the first recommendation engine of any kind that I find useful in the slightest. I think that's because it is based on an analysis of the music, not of the users who like the music.

My experience w/ recommendation engines that look at user patterns has been dismal. I also have little use for social networking software and have never understood all the buzz about it. Every time I sign up for a socialnet it's a one time experience--I sign up and then never return to use the network again. A complete waste. For me last.fm or other music recommendation schemes revolving around trying to determing like patterns among end users are utter busts. But Pandora works fabulously. Perhaps the only time I've found music I didn't know but which I loved via a recommendation engine.

Posted by: Jason Chervokas | Jan 23, 2006 9:13:00 AM

How long do you have to listen to LastFM before its recommendations get good? I'm about 2,000 tracks in (of it monitoring my Itunes) and my analysis so far is "almost but not entirely as bad as Pandora."

Posted by: Mike Orren | Jan 23, 2006 9:42:17 AM

Last.fm looks like a great service. I just can't understand how they STILL don't have a tool to track usage on an iPod.

Posted by: Mr Juggles | Jan 23, 2006 10:08:58 AM

Pandora's greatest strength is it's ability to put in an artist and get a 'sounds like' playlist out of it - this is also it's greatest weakness, the playlist it produces turn into a drone of sameness mostly of artists you've never heard of. Last.FM, on the other hand, because of it's reliance on aggregate playback statistics, gives you a much more interesting playlist, and I much prefer it, even though I get a lot of dropouts in their stream. The tagging features of Last.FM are nice also, however, it can be frustrating since music does not map well into a one-dimensional space – try building a playlist based on the tag ‘Sunday Morning’ – you have no idea if you are getting classical, electronica, soft rock, or what (actually I’d like a mix of all of them). So while I consider Last.FM to be superior, it’s still a long ways from what I’m looking for. There are still to many times when I just give up and turn on the radio.

Posted by: Craig Huizenga | Jan 23, 2006 10:17:44 AM

I have to say that I am in the pro-pandora camp while admitting that I have not spent much time with last.fm. Pandora has been great for me and has been far better than any peer to peer recommendation engine I have used. While I do agree that Pandora does come up with "monotonous" playlists sometimes (due to the fact that it is analyzes music to music and not user to user), I do believe it helps the user to find music and bands that they would have never heard of. Maybe Pandora shouldn't be used as a "radio" and should be used more as a recommendation engine that you listen to and then buy the songs you like (they do have the built in buying feature). That is how I use Pandora. Just my $0.02.

Also, it is worth noting that Pandora has musicians cataloguing the music based on certain characteristics so it is not purely computer run.

On a side note: I did a VentureWeek podcast on the future of music that included Tim Westergren of Pandora along with Ali Partovi of GarageBand.com and Kelley Egan of BestBuy that may be of interest to you and your readers. The permalink is: http://www.ventureweek.com/podcast/2005/11/23/ventureweek-3-music-technology/

Posted by: Eric Olson | Jan 23, 2006 10:57:25 AM

I am a huge fan of last FM for two distinct reasons. Pandora's approach to a computer knowing what i like is against all the principals of how and why i listen to music.

I listen to the music that my friends listen to - or i help them to find new music - thats is a huge part of the enjoyment of music - talking about it and hsaring a life experience associated with it - music cannot be put to me in a vacuum. Pandora's approach has over-reached - kind of like shazam. Its a cool tech so it must work - well Last FM has looked much harder at the user experience side and has found me discovering alot more good music as a result.

As an aside, Last uses some pretty nifty Ajax in talking to your machine - dare i say it fits in a 2.0 category. (oh no)

Posted by: mark slater | Jan 23, 2006 10:58:58 AM

Hi Fred,

You should check out Beatport (www.beatport.com). Not because you would like the music (it's all techno/dance stuff) but because of the interface and business model. It's probably the best UI out there for trying/buying music and anything you buy can be downloaded in 320KBP MP3. A great example of how an under exposed segment of the music industry that isn't dominated by the big labels and their DRM obsession can create a fantastic online buying experience.

Posted by: Bill Burnham | Jan 23, 2006 12:24:53 PM

I agree Fred, I've probably tried Pandora five different times for a couple of hours each in different music genres and have found it's recommendations to be lacking.

Last.fm has worked better for me, and I think I'll start to use it more. My biggest problem with it is that I mostly listen at work at home with Rhapsody, which Last.fm doesn't track. Hopefully, they will soon.

Posted by: Pat McCarthy | Jan 23, 2006 12:58:49 PM

[gasp] Fred, are you on a tear against computer algorithms (Yahoo vs. Google, Knowledge-In vs. Reference Analysis)?? Just kidding. ;-)

I've tried both services during the past two months and have found them useful. One great flaw to Last.fm I've encountered endlessly: when listening to Classical, Last.fm sporadically presents "Classic Rock" in my stream - which is a real turn off (having to fumble for the "PLEASE DON'T PLAY THIS EVER, EVER AGAIN" button between Chopin and Mozart).

Does anyone know what happened to MuBu.com (Music Buddha)?? I purchased at least 100 albums through that service years ago and then it suddenly disappeared. A year later I floated an inquiry to acquire their IP assets, but never heard a peep.

Posted by: Damion Hankejh | Jan 23, 2006 4:22:09 PM

One feature that I like on Pandora is the ability to set up different stations under the same user id. I find myself listening to different kinds of music depending on what kind of mood I'm in. So on Pandora I have set up different stations for my various listening "moods" (classic rock, indie rock, blues, etc.) As far as I know, last.fm does not have this capability, unless you set up different user id's for each category of music that you listen to. If your musical tastes span multiple music genres, your last.fm station will rotate through all of those genres. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong on that. With that said, I'm not 100% sold on the Pandora recommendation engine. Too often I find myself banning songs that miss the mark.

Posted by: Mike D. | Jan 23, 2006 5:27:31 PM

I also prefer last.fm to pandora. I find that I have to continually tinker with pandora to get it to play a mix of music that isn't totally monotonous. Last.fm on the other hand plays a varied mix of music that fits my listening habits and I rarely have to interrupt my work to change it.

Of course the biggest thing with last.fm and pandora is they have to have music in their system that you like. They both have music to fit my tastes fairly well.

Posted by: spi | Jan 23, 2006 5:44:14 PM

I actually use both, starting with the one who's button I find first on windows startup. As soon as I have to change songs too often I switch to the other service.

As some mentioned before, I also noticed Last.fm differing between Music Genres track after track. Since I listen to a wide varity of music, depending on the occasion or my temporary mood, the change in music style, sometimes is annoying.

Both services are still way better than any FM aired radiostation that I can recieve. I live near Munich Germany and all major radiostaions just play crap and those are the I only ones I recieve in acceptable quality.

Posted by: Flo | Jan 24, 2006 2:40:30 AM

"I'm guessing the genome project doesn't have a field in their database for anything as fuzzy as how the music makes you feel."

... or how fuzzy the music makes you feel.

Posted by: Emmet Connolly | Jan 24, 2006 10:00:33 AM

Pandora is reductive- by analyzing what you like, it weeds out what is dissimilar.

Last.fm is expansive- by linking you to other users who listen to similar things, it connects you to music that may not share formal qualities to your current listening habits, but clearly pleases those who share your tastes.

I think Last.fm works a lot better for the obsessive music nerd, because it extends the social experience of finding new bands. I'm someone who is already getting a lot of social input: I dj and write about music and play in a band, so I'm exposed to a lot of music that's just bubbling up. Last.fm completments the programming directors, magazine editors and club bookers who are also front line editors for the impossibly large world of independent music.

I've yet to have Pandora find a hidden gem for me- just some quality second-tier genre bands. Five years ago, nothing in my listening habits would have lead me to electroclash, which I ended up really liking. Two years ago, nothing would have lead me to listen to the neo-folk. I'm much more ambivalent about that, but I am glad I was lead into exploring it.

Posted by: Bendy | Jan 24, 2006 10:05:53 AM

It's crazy how peopl can be so far on either side of this discussion. I'm alos one who gives Pandora a try every few months and absolutely cannot stand it. I haven't tried last.fm yet. Yahoo Launch is OK. This all proves to me that humans make the best DJs. I mostly listen to Sirius online when I'm at my PC.

Posted by: pwb | Jan 24, 2006 2:01:55 PM

I'm a lazy technophobe and I live behind a firewall at the office. I tried installing Last.fm and couldn't make it work - either I'm too stupid or the firewall blocked it. Either way, the Last.fm website is not particularly friendly to new users. They would do well to remember that 99% of their potential users are slugs like me.

Pandora is easy. No doubt it has flaws. I am constantly amazed at what it doesn't recommend (for example, a group formed by over half of the members of the group I used as the seed for a station). I am also amazed at some of the random recommendations it makes - it seems like it tests me to see how far afield it can go before I will reject a song. Still, on the whole, it is useful to me.

I wonder if the level of sophistication of the listener plays a role in determining whether he or she finds pandora useful. By that I mean that I am not a particularly sophisticated musical consumer; much of what pandora has suggested to me is probably music that someone who is really into the music (such as Fred) would have known about.

Posted by: Alan | Jan 25, 2006 7:26:11 PM

I too am a big fan of last.fm

Do you get your album covers you display on your blog from a last.fm plug in there or is last.fm only providing your list of most listened to artists?

Posted by: Anthony | Jan 26, 2006 3:50:54 PM

I'm a huge fan of Last.FM as well, and agree with everything you've said about the relative merits of Pandora. This last week in particular, I've had the "it just never finds anything I want" discussion about Pandora with quite a few people. I suppose if I had more mainstream tastes, Pandora would be more worthwhile, but when I try typing in 5 of my favorite bands to seed it, and it can only find one of them, I quickly lose the desire to keep playing.

Posted by: Chris | Jan 27, 2006 9:26:29 AM

Re: the streaming radio on last.fm

It's even better than that, you can listen to streams based on (your own, or global) tags. I generally listen to my own largish collection of oggs, and I only use the stream to discover new music, through the 'recommended' radio which is one of the greatest features of last.fm IMO. Especially in combination with 'discovery mode' which prevents the same tracks from coming by twice.

Posted by: eric casteleijn | Feb 1, 2006 2:37:27 PM

Last.fm rocks! I've tried Pandora a few times and it just doesn't do it for me. Started using last.fm for the first time today and I've been listening to it for about an hour. The player is easy to use, and far less annoying than Pandora's - also maybe it is just me but I found Pandora quite buggy - the stream would drop out at random and then it would start playing the next song, without "forwarding" to it in the window. Last.fm has yet to drop out - it's every bit as good as listening to a CD. I started out by listing "Elvis" (first thing that came to mind) and already it has played me various tracks, including Mozart and Dean Martin! Don't know how they relate to Elvis but I am *sure* that Pandora would not have given me these tracks...

Posted by: Stephen | Feb 3, 2006 1:41:37 AM

"the problem with Pandora is they're trying to algorithmically define music." Posted by: Erik

Exactly. Music is emotional not technical. Just because two songs use similar sounds, structures, or instrument type, that does not mean both songs are good...certainly doesn't mean I will like both. Those technical aspects are useful, they're just not the most valid predictor of what I want to hear. I mean, when someone plays a song 22 times in a week, they're not thinking, "I can't get enough of this mild rhythmic syncopation and major key tonality," they're just thinking, "Man, I F#!**** LOVE this song!" And that's the predictor I want working for me.

Posted by: Rosco | Feb 4, 2006 7:23:51 PM

My own experience with Pandora is that it gives me more of the same. Which is alright. Sometimes there are some discoveries but not usually.

Generally it's more interesting to have one's horizons broadened. Which happens with the last.fm system.

Exploring other's listening patterns is a wonderful notion. Find some like-minded or admired listeners and enjoy what they listen to and learn. The potential of being a university of music.

Posted by: LVV Dance | Feb 5, 2006 4:08:12 PM

Yahoo! decided to throw its hat in this ring. Here's the post.

http://ymusicblog.com/blog/2006/02/10/yahoo-music-personalization-primer-pandora-lastfm-soundflavor/

Posted by: ian c rogers | Feb 11, 2006 11:59:48 AM

I use both services regularly and love them both for what they are. If I'm looking for a certain type of music, I find Pandora to be much more reliable. Mistagging on last.fm is rampant, which makes it challenging to find things within the same genre sometimes. The music genome project makes Pandora much more dependable in this area. I also find that, contrary to some complaints above, if I add several songs or artists to a Pandora station, I can actually create a varied music experience.

But I still love last.fm for all its great chart, tagging, and social networking features. And as others have mentioned, when I'm feeling adventurous, neighbor radio is a great way to find musical styles I'd never go seek out on my own.

As far as I'm concerned, they're two very different services, each with their own advantages and drawbacks. I don't see this as a "versus" or "either/or" issue.

Oh, and if anyone's interested, you might want to try the PandoraFM mashup at http://pandorafm.real-ity.com. It does require a last.fm user ID.

Posted by: Seth | Jul 8, 2006 12:10:34 PM

In my subjective opinion, I believe that pandora has far better 'similar artists' service. In last.fm many bands, whose musical style has changed over the years, have so differently musically orriented similar artists.

Perfect example is last.fm similar artists of "Depeche Mode". Similarity shows itself not just in music but in different factors - fashion, lyrics, history...

But Pandora is just about music..

By the way, I use both of them and I express gratitude to developers of these services..

Posted by: rodzhers | Jul 23, 2006 5:41:17 PM

Mike Orren, last.fm actually does have a program that takes your Ipod played songs and uploads it to your database! It's called Isproggler. Hopefully you return to this page in the future.

Posted by: Steve Pavlik | Aug 29, 2006 11:26:06 AM

I find that Pandora works best when you start simple. Give it a song rather than a band. Keep music from radically different genres on separate stations. Pandora won't know what to do with a station that has both the Chemical Brothers and Ani Difranco. I do find that I have to monitor and maintain Pandora every hour or so when it will throw something a little "off" my way. But I like this. It's like Pandora is testing me: let's give her something with more of a [dance beat, acoustic section, etc]. Using the above parameters, Pandora has introduced me to fantastic new music.

Posted by: Karma | Sep 25, 2006 1:35:16 AM

Posted by: Karma | Sep 25, 2006 1:35:18 AM

Hi! I have a fantastic new video I'd like to recommend to everyone. The singer has a beautiful voice and the melody is so inspiring.Please help me get this to eveyone!How do I do it?
tsila

Posted by: tsila | Oct 1, 2006 1:14:40 AM

Anyone who scrolls down this far should definitely check out the service I work on... It's called finetune... we've been described as the love-child of pandora and last.fm... truth is we use a variety of approaches to determine relatedness among artists... some tags, some data mining, some genre mining, etc... it's also free. Shameless plug.

Posted by: mykel | Oct 6, 2006 11:09:26 AM

As many comments have mentioned: I have had exactly the opposite experience. I keep trying to use last.fm but always end up using Pandora. Maybe this is a Yin and Yang battle.

Posted by: Hornswaggled | Dec 22, 2006 1:51:36 AM

As many users above have said, I had pretty much the opposite experience: I used last.fm for several years and, although I enjoyed its song-tracking system, I never got any songs I liked from it. I've also used numerous other song-rating systems online that are also based on aggregate user information, like Yahoo!s launch.com site. All have gotten mixed results (though that one got better results than last.fm, but I dropped it because of the ads and the lack of community). I then tried pandora, not expecting to get much out of it (it sounded like one of those "good idea in theory, but unlikely to work in practice" things), and was absolutely blown away by its awesome. It not only consistently gave me songs I loved, but also greatly expanded my knowledge and understanding of music, and consistently exposed me to songs and artists I never would have tried or learned about otherwise (including my current favorite artist, Regina Spektor) and of what aspects of songs tend to "resonate" with me; on its own, it almost made me want to take a music theory class just to understand the concepts better. Although it has some problems (like a deficit of classical and world music), Pandora is an incredible accomplishment.

Of course, Pandora gets mixed results depending on the person involved. 8 out of 10 of the people I've linked Pandora to have been extremely surprised and impressed by the results, but for others it hasn't clicked; I think this is largely because any music-recommending system will only work for people with certain types of tastes, and even then only to an extent. So, one type of person might be best-suited for something like last.fm, while another might be best-suited for something like Pandora. It seems to me that someone who tends to have more predictable, "mainstream" (even if only mainstream within a certain subculture), genre-oriented tastes is most likely to be benefited by last.fm, since last.fm-style sites rely on the assumption that your tastes will be similar to the tastes of everyone else who has some songs in common with you. last.fm is thus at its strongest when this assumption is as close to reality as possible: when your musical tastes are very comparable to other users'. This is probably why last.fm has gotten such poor results for many people, myself included: my tastes are very eclectic and strange, and it is hard to predict what I will like based on what other users like. Just because I like the Beatles doesn't mean I'll necessarily like Oasis or Radiohead. So, this systemic problem in last.fm and similar sites makes it of limited use.

Pandora, in contrast, while also having limited use, has an extremely different method which will thus give superior results to a different group of music listeners: people who tend to like songs (albeit usually subconsciously) based on specific elements within songs, rather than based on conventional stylistic groupings. For example, suppose you like Bob Dylan not because you like folk music (or even a certain strain of folk music), but because you like a certain element of his instrumentation, vocalization, lyrical content, or metre? If so, then Pandora is likely to be able to recommend other artists you'd like who have similar characteristics, whereas last.fm is almost sure to fail in that respect. Although Pandora does account for genres (usually calling them "influences", and judging them on a song-by-song rather than artist-by-artist basis), this is a relatively minor aspect of the overall Music Genome Project, so it is to be expected that Pandora will expose you to a lot of whole ranges, styles, and genres of music that you would never have heard of if you'd stuck solely to the user-based last.fm system. So, both systems have their virtues, and their vices; which system suits you better will be based more on your own specific aesthetic leanings rather than on any sort of objective superiority of one system over the other.

Also, it should be noted that "The problem is music is effective based on a listener's emotional response to it, not their intellectual response to it." is not a very good criticism of Pandora, because it fails to account for the fact that emotional responses are often based on specific "cues" just as much as intellectual responses are. Just because emotions aren't intellectual or "solid" doesn't mean that they are never causally connected to specific experiences, patterns of which can certainly be studied. Pandora doesn't try to study emotions directly, because doing so would be too subjective; what it does do is study the elements of music which are most likely to provoke emotions. Someone can (and many people do) react to a certain element without even knowing what that element is, so it's false to say that Pandora requires that you intellectualize, or even coherently describe, your music tastes; Pandora itself handles that job, all on its own. For example, I find that I often have a strong emotional reaction to dramatic embedded string sections in songs; I never knew that before using Pandora, yet nevertheless felt the emotional reaction regularly when I heard that specific sound in completely unrelated songs. Pandora identifies such patterns in one's song tastes and capitalizes on them in order to suggest songs with similar elements, based on the assumption that someone who loves 10 songs with element X is likely to like another song with element X; just as last.fm refines itself gradually over time by hearing you play more songs, so does Pandora refine itself via a more direct route: it suggests songs that will give it the most information regarding which elements illicit positive reactions from you, and which do not. As I said above, this sort of system isn't for everyone, but its remarkable success for most people testifies to the fact that just because people's reactions to songs are emotional, doesn't mean that they aren't based on various specific, studyable characteristics of songs.

Incidentally, I continue to use both last.fm and Pandora. But I primarily use the former for socializing and tracking my song records, and the latter for actual song recommendations. Having used last.fm (originally as Audioscrobbler) for many years now and racked up over 13,000 plays, it's safe to say at this point that its ratings are never going to be very useful to me for finding new artists and songs I love.

Posted by: Raugust | Feb 8, 2007 10:56:53 PM

Here's another music dicovery website.
You can enter an artist name and it will give you a 'tag cloud' of similar artists. It's an easy way to find bands you haven't discovered yet !

http://artistcloud.camaris.be

Posted by: Camaris | Apr 28, 2007 4:58:04 PM

it seems that in last.fm also you can find tendencies. Its really hard sometimes to find different music, other... well anyway.. i tried to put different radio tags.. and sometimes i just keep getting same artists/songs all the time.. same songs.. so i guess its "bugged" in a way.. that it is.

Posted by: mac | Aug 2, 2007 11:52:03 AM

A VC

Musings of a VC in NYC