Why Pandora is better than last.fm

I’ve recently started listening to Pandora again. It’s an internet radio service where you tell it an artist you like, then it makes a station with songs that it thinks you’ll also enjoy. Sound familiar? It’s quite a common idea — last.fm does the same thing.

The difference is in the logic used. Pandora uses experts who listen to songs, and then find their “genetic fingerprint” (seriously, that’s what they call it — it’s part of the Music Genome Project). You can have a look at what they’ve decided is important for any song you’re listening to — sometimes the things they’ve noted are quite interesting.

The other site, last.fm, basically just analyses your entire music library, then uses that to decide that to decide that somehow all the artists in your library must be somehow related. Then it looks at those statistics for everyone, and suggests things that you may be missing from your library.

The problem I think is this: Pandora analyses the songs, and suggests similar songs (or artists). Last.fm doesn’t understand about music at all — it justs understands statistics. If it was based on my CD collection, it would come up with suggestions like this: “You like Augie March? Well, you’re going to love Amon Tobin.” I have every album by both those artists; unfortunately that statement is rarely going to be true (unless there’s something about my musical taste I’ve missed). I like different artists for different moods. Luckily last.fm ignores most of those small problems — after all, probably most Augie March owners aren’t also Amon Tobin owners. It’ll suggest something that everyone else has. Which is just boring. I tried it for a day or two — it didn’t suggest anything that was interesting to me at all. You certainly couldn’t just put it on and listen.

Pandora, on the other hand, does a great job. You can actually just choose an artist, and it’ll make reasonable suggestions. (Actually, Augie March may have been a bad example; it does very badly there — that and Elliott Smith.) I’ve actually discovered quite a few different bands I may have to investigate more through it. It’s much more worth spending your time investigating.

I only have one suggestion: could the people who do the last.fm website and software go and work for Pandora? Last.fm really wins on the website and software integration front. (I’m not sure Pandora actually has any software to download.) I want a downloadable Pandora client, and possibly something that can integrate with iTunes. That’d be cool.