Pandora VS Last.FM

I love music, so it comes as no surprise that I enjoy a good music discovery service. I am constantly on the prowl for music, and with my eclectic taste, the search is endless. Two popular services that I use quite often are Last.FM and Pandora. These two services are responsible for my lack of hard drive space, but I’m not complaining.

I have received quite a few questions regarding both services such as which one is better, what are the differences, and more. The answer is not so simple, and I say this because I like to use both, each serving its own purpose to work together helping me in discovering as much music as possible.

I’ll start with Pandora. 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. Pandora’s recommendations are based on the intrinsic qualities of the music. Give Pandora an artist or song, and it will find similar music in terms of melody, harmony, lyrics, orchestration, vocal character and so on. Pandora likes to call these musical attributes “genes” and its database of songs, classified against hundreds of such attributes, the “Music Genome Project.”

I love using Pandora and it does what is does quite well, in my opinion. Now let’s take a look at Last.FM. Last.fm is a social recommender. It knows just a little bit about a songs’ intrinsic qualities. It just assumes that if you and a group of other people enjoy many of the same artists, you will probably enjoy other artists popular with that group. How so? Well, Last.fm does so by providing users an optional plug-in that automatically monitors your media player software so that whatever you listen to can be incorporated into your Last.fm profile and thus be used as the basis for recommendations.

Some people are able to tell you, without hesitation, which is better, but I cannot say which is better as I mentioned above that each gives me something stronger than the other can achieve. Last.FM is great. I listen to my music on iTunes. It “Scrobbles” my songs and there they are on my personal website. If you constantly listen to music, like myself, Last.FM starts realizing which sort of groups you match up with and what type of music you would listen to, based on what you are listening to.  It is a social network, so Last.FM is amazing at introducing you to people whom like the same music as you. Not only does Last.FM give you recommendations based on what you listen to, but users (potentially friends) give you recommendations based on music you listen to and what they listen to also.

However, where Last.FM stops working for me is when I want to find music based on music qualities. I really like Dave Barnes subtle  vocal tonalities, rhythmic patterns, acoustic remedies, etc, but can Last.FM help me find music like that? No, but Pandora can. That is where I use Pandora most; when I need to truly find music based on qualities that I like in a song. Most of the time, Pandora is spot-on when I give it an artist of song.

So I use both services. They are great, and I blame/thank them for my current collection of songs totaling a little over five thousand songs that I truly enjoy. Michael Arrington of Techcrunch states, “Each allows you to find new music that you are likely to enjoy. Last.fm does this through analysis of what you listen to and like (and what others listen to and like). Pandora encodes different aspects of music and determines what you might like based on those factors.Pandora is easier to use because it takes absolutely no setup and streams music on the site itself. Last.fm uses tagging and has social network aspects, but you have to download the player to listen to music.”

What Last.fm and Pandora do is hard, and the people who built these services deserve a lot of credit. Given the ambitious scope, it is easy to find examples where each of the services comes up short, but give them a try, and I am sure you will love both!