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Comparison of Pandora and Last.fm
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Feb 01, 2006 06:42 AM
from the tell-me-what-i-like dept.
from the tell-me-what-i-like dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Blogger Steve Krause takes an interesting look at how music recommenders Pandora and Last.fm work, including some algorithmic strengths and weaknesses. Although he seems to think Last.fm is better now, his punchline is that a combination of their approaches will eventually be the real winner and for that, Pandora can more easily become like Last.fm than the other way around."
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Comparison of Pandora and Last.fm
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That reminds me (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.mewshi.com/)
seriously, I think Last.fm has a serious advantage, mostly because there's plug-ins for Linux media players. Heck, amaroK [kde.org] has built in support for it. So, until Pandora has that kind of 'market share' Last.fm will be way better, at least in my eyes.
Re:That reminds me (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.bloglines.com/blog/MatthewHayhurst)
Lastfm (Score:5, Informative)
The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Score:5, Informative)
I've played with both services as well, and I have now been a happy (and paying) last.fm user for several months. I don't quite share the author's enthusiasm about Pandora; in my case (and for some of the friends I tried it for), its recommendations were not quite that good.
The centralized music genome inventory that Pandora relies on reminds me of a Cathedral, while Last.fm is more like a Bazaar of babbling voices -- now I wonder where that metaphor comes from!
I think Last.fm has more potential because it is fundamentally a social service -- it feels a lot more like other open online communities I have come to know and love, whereas Pandora seems more like a black-box to me (something the review author also mentioned).
Pandora and DRM (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pandora and DRM (Score:5, Informative)
Each track is seperated by a string, "SYNC" which the player detects. It's pretty easy to copy the stream, split it into multiple files and automaticaly tag and name them correctly actually. It took me about 20 minutes to hack some Python together to do it.
Perfect timing (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Perfect timing (Score:5, Informative)
We're also busy readying some cool new features to be released by the end of the week...subscribers will also have access to a beta site (beta.last.fm) later today to try out some of these new goodies.
-----
http://www.last.fm/user/flaneur [www.last.fm]
Last.fm rocks (Score:1, Redundant)
(http://personals.ac.upc.edu/mgupta)
Last.fm marketing (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.vanderlee.com/)
Leakage (Score:2)
huh?
Why would Last.fm choose those particular artists? Why not look at the record label, country of origin, style and similar artists? I know they don't want to get 'locked in' to a certain pattern but this is a bit off.
Recommending Aerosmith to Bob Marley fans is like recommending Slayer to Beach Boys fans.
Re:Leakage (Score:4, Interesting)
When I checked Last.fm's similar artists to the reggae legend Bob Marley, first on the list was James Brown, followed by The Chemical Brothers, then Aerosmith.
All that this indicates is that a lot of people who listen to Bob Marley also happen to listen to James Brown etc. That's how last.fm works, as far as I understand - it recommends stuff based on what other people listen to. If fans of artist A also listen to artist B then it makes the link between the two and recommends artist B to all fans of artist A. I think that if last.fm started trying to exclude stuff because eg: "Bob Marley fans are never going to want to listen to The Chemical Brothers!" then they'd be missing a trick if their data clearly show that a lot of people *do* listen to both.
Recommending Aerosmith to Bob Marley fans is like recommending Slayer to Beach Boys fans.
Again, if a lot of last.fm users listened to The Beach Boys and Slayer then yes, it would make that recommendation.
Last.fm worked out the kinks (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.ryancragun.com/)
Similar but different... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.kallisti.net.nz/)
2 Downloads for LastFM (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.the-forgotten.org/)
No thanks. I'll stick with pandora.
After spending some time rating songs as likes and dislikes it has done fine for me.
Re:2 Downloads for LastFM (Score:4, Funny)
easier (Score:3, Funny)
(http://www.beatking.com/)
What? (Score:2, Troll)
Me, I don't have the slightest idea of what pandora or last.fm are.
Pandora rocks (Score:2, Insightful)
Last.FM Recommendations (Score:2)
(http://www.mbardeen.net/diary)
Users receive personalized recommendations based on what they've played and last.fm has implemented a cool little interface that lets you choose between how popular or obscure your recommendations. For me, that seems to cut down on the misplaced music genere problem and actually generates music that I might actually listen to.
The trick is to implement a similar filter for all recommendations, maybe in addition to a filter based on tags (which last.fm supports). I think the idea behind last.fm is good, it just needs to be tweaked a little bit.
The del.icio.us approach (Score:1)
(http://youbegin.blogspot.com/)
slashdot last.fm group (Score:2)
(http://hungersite.com/)
Pandora (Score:2)
(http://www.wikisteve.com/ | Last Journal: Monday March 27 2006, @09:05PM)
Human Expert vs. Social Network (Score:1)
Is anyone aware of how pandora determines the attributes of a particular song before it recommends it?
Are they manually tagged by a human 'expert' or is there any automated algorithm that analyses the music?
Now if pandora does utilize human experts surely pandora is going to come under enormous logistical pressure as its remit expands, whereas a social network like Last.fm will flourish?
While it is an interesting article... (Score:2, Informative)
I have been using this service for the last 4 years, and it's helped me to discover LOTS of new bands and songs that I prior would not have known about. I simply click on how much I like an artist, and so it plays more songs from that artist or songs from similar artists. I can rate albums, songs, and artists themselves, so I am getting results based on how an album sounds, a song sounds, or an artist in general.
So yea, Last.Fm is cool and all, but for those of us on the Launch bandwagon for so many years, it's hardly revolutionary.
Pandora should get out of the player business (Score:1)
I'd rather have an interface into Pandora's recommendation engine directly without the pretense of actually listening to everything they recommend. As is, I often let it run muted while I listen to other music, checking what they recommend every so often on Napster.
I like != I don't dislike (Score:3, Insightful)
I say that because after using both Pandora (less) and last.fm (more) for a while, I found out that although last.fm fails (gives me music I dislike) much less, Pandora's successes are more intense, even if less common. Last.fm finds a whole lot of stuff that's OK, but Pandora finds some stuff that's awesome.
To me, one new artist I really like is worth hundreds of ones I don't care about.
Used Pandora wrong (Score:1, Informative)
Comments on last.fm (Score:3, Informative)
(http://infaux.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday September 01 2005, @02:08PM)
2. Excellent database of obscure music artists. Any name I threw at them, there was an entry for it. I even uploaded some album pics
3. Friendly community
and now the bad.
1. The last.fm player is horrible. Horrible usability, and often I just get nothing for music. Can't use it at work. Prior buggy version muted itself unless you gave it exclusive focus.
2. The audioscrobbler plug-in often refuses to handshake.
3. The combination of both is a bit obfuscated.
4. You see just how badly tagged Mp3s across the world are. You often find the wrong tracks, or 20 similarly-named tracks of the same song for an artist. Not last.fm's fault, but it would be nice someday to fuzzy logic them together.
5. A bit bureaucratic in getting artist images uploaded. If it's an unpopular artist, it will never get the # of votes needed to surface.
Pandora wins (Score:4, Interesting)
There is one massive difference between the two that has been overlooked. When you put an artist into Last.fm, you get a list of bands. Okay. Good enough. Look at the bands. I typed in "Garbage" and all the bands at the top were bands who's songs have been overplayed on radio for a while, meaning I already know who they are. Thanks anyway.
#18 was the first band I hadn't heard of. I checked them out and didn't like them so I moved on. #30 was next and by them I'm already down to only a 50% match. So tell me how does a service help if the only recommendations it has are bands I already know I like or don't like? How does this help if the only bands on it that I've never heard of are matched below 50%
Putting "Garbage" into Pandora and I got a band I'd never heard of on the 3rd song. Put in Garbage again and totally different songs come up. Type in Garbage again Last.fm and what do you get? The exact same list.
I decided to try a totally different band. I typed in Wumpscut. Here again, I already know all these bands and the first band I haven't heard is way down at 53% again. This doesn't help me because down there the bands sound totally different than the one I typed in.
So what's the point in telling me other bands I might like if I've already over-heard those bands and already know whether or not I like them? Why give me the exact same list every time? I did't like the first one I want another. Pandora creates a true mix and exposes far more unknown music than Last.fm does.
Rolling Stone just published an article on this (Score:1)
It's in the print edition hitting mailboxes right now. It mentions Pandora, last.fm, and three others. It hit their website yesterday.
I use both... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://theorybloc.blogspot.com/)
I suspect statistics will triumph over design, no matter how knowledgeable a group of musicologists you assemble. At the very least, statistics can do it faster and easier, because it skips the messy aesthetic questions and cuts right to behavior of peers (objective data).
One example of this efficiency in action: Pandora has been struggling to include latin and classical music. Last.fm doesn't care if you listen to white noise all day long (as long as someone else is too).
Pandora can behave unhelpfully if you program a station with a bunch of genre crossing interests (I've found that I have to compartmentalize my tastes into subgenres for Pandora to behave sensibly).
But Pandora lets me compartmentalize my tastes for more accuracy. The Last.fm algorithm gets diluted by my punk interests when recommending new funk for me to listen to, and vice versa.
And sometimes, when you're looking for recommendations, sometimes you don't just want to follow the crowd. Sometimes you want the help of an expert whose taste you admire, and sometimes you want something completely random.
Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to create a station on Pandora using your top artists of the week in Last.fm automatically? Wouldn't it be great to import all your distates from Pandora into Last.fm?
Who's got a script to hybridize these two, make them greater than the sum of their parts?
Where's the script... (Score:2)
(http://theorybloc.blogspot.com/)
Can we get a greasemonkey script or something to take our top artists from Last.fm and build a station on Pandora?
Alternatively, I wish I could specify my distaste for certain artists in Last.fm...
Tragedy of Commons like Napster (Score:2)
(http://www.kabong.ca/)
The same problem applies to Last FM. I do lots of searching around for weird and obscure music, and all too often one of the highest Google hits will be a page on Last FM that's simply wrong.
eg. The Crystal Method did not do a version of "Carol Of The Bells," TomAndAndy did. Once again, a potentially useful tool gets polluted by bad data and ignorant users.
Sounds good. But where is the music? (Score:2)
(http://www.milliondollarscreenshot.com/)
DJRate [djrate.com] just implements this idea. Still alpha but it works. You can find music by tags or by profile comparaison. Simple but efficient. And each time one adds a link, every one benefits. (end yes, more info about the artists will be added)
What about Yahoo Launchcast? (Score:1)
For those who's tried Yahoo's service this may seem odd since it only works in Internet Explorer as it's ActiveX based and it contains annoying adverts for most people, but at least it's still community driven as Last.FM is
The reason why I stick with launch is because all the music is normalized to ONE level. I don't understand why the other services haven't done this. It's so annoying to constantly change the volume up and down.
My recollection is... (Score:2)
Which is why it has limited benefit...if the record companies don't want you to try the music they designate as music you can try, you can't. This is were intellectual property leads - you can't play songs for friends who might want to buy it if they like it.
Lastfm has obscure down pat (Score:2)
(http://flowmytears.livejournal.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday January 19 2002, @11:44AM)
They've got verything from British avant-rock pioneers This Heat to Japanese underground legend Keiji Haino with stops at New Zealand (Straightjacket Fits and Look Blue Go Purple) and '70s Germany (Faust, Can, and Popol Vuh).
So I'm probably sticking with Last, though I've encountered a few problems (wonky Windows player, repeating tracks on "similar artist stations," etc.)
Inside the Net (Score:2)
a) Since it was created by someone who was a member of one of those "new" bands pining for recognition, he understands the importance of what he's doing.
b)Just as you might suspect, once these kinds of services start becoming popular, you've got the RIAA offering cash in exchange for bias (the same kind of garbage now regularly undertaken by radio stations). He has stated that he wants no part of this...his mission is to allow people to discover new music, not to "present" them whatever happens to be in a queue of someone else's making.
It seems to me that whatever shortfalls Pandora might have, it comes much closer to fulfilling its stated objective - that of allowing users to discover new music - than services relying on others recommendations, since "recommendations" can be tainted in any number of ways.
Its like Copmaring Aplles with Oranges (Score:1)
(http://www.blowfly.com.au/)
Last FM is a tagging service based on user recomendations so it can be consdered to be a pull service .
Collaborative Filtering (Score:1)
Out of those papers I found the ideas in Collaborative Filtering with Privacy (2002), by John Canny (Computer Science Division, UC Berkeley) the most interesting. It talks about using homomorphic encryption to store a public profile. Pretty sweet.
Pandora is much better (Score:2)
my gripe with both services (Score:1)
(http://www.aceticket.com/)
What about launch? (Score:2)
Exploring the database (Score:2)
(http://livejournal.com/users/repton_infinity/)
The thing I miss from Pandora is the ability to explore their database without listening to the music.
Broadband is not free in New Zealand. Most broadband plans here are capped at a few gigabytes a month of traffic. I'd prefer not to spend all day pulling down a megabyte a minute just to explore new music...
With last.fm (and its predecessor Audioscrobbler), I can explore the similar artist lists. Or, I can find someone with similar tastes to myself and see what they are listening to. Or, I can pick an artist, find a fan of that artist, and look at their play history. Then I can wander to the library and borrow some CDs.
Much lower bandwidth, and it works well, but because of the problems people have raised with last.fm, I'd like to be able to do the same thing with Pandora...
Blatant self promotion (Score:1)
Heh, bit late but I wrote a journal at last.fm on why last.fm is better than Pandora: journal here [www.last.fm]
FOAFING THE MUSIC:: another music recommender (Score:1)
Here's another music recommender, named Foafing the Music. Its based on user listening habits (tracked from Audioscrobbler/last.fm) and user profiling (from the user's FOAF profile -e.g LiveJournal, Tribe.net, my.opera.com, or directly from a user account in www.blogger.com).
Although its still more focused on the research, it has a lot of interesting stuff in it, for instance the system recommends to the user:
Cheers, Oscar.