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Last.fm vs Pandora

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KharBevNor:

--- Quote ---I don't know about the actual radio, but I feel like Pandora has a lot more artists in its database than Last.fm.  When I search for artists in Last.fm, I frequently come up empty, while I feel that Pandora knows all my songs.  Also, Pandora recognizes a lot of remixes.  I listen to a lot of beepboopbeepboop Euro electro pop, so that might have something to do with it.
--- End quote ---

I don't know about such things. Last.fm has complete access to the EMI and Warner catalogues, including all their subsidiaries, plus countless others. True, there are glaring gaps, but in a lot of cases they're artists that wouldn't want their music on either service. Despite the relative obscurity of a lot of music I listen to, I find that about 4 out of 5 artists I listen to are somewhere on last.fm radio, many offering user-selectable previews or free downloads. Each artist profile has features where you can network with other fans of the artist, a full wiki entry for every artist (often better than Wikipedias), links to further information, easily browsable indexes of similiar artists, lists of the bands gigs sorted by their closeness to you, all sorts of shit. Pandora is like one aspect of last.fm, implemented poorly. Also, I have a LOT more trust in last.fms system of determining recommendations than Pandoras. For example, Pandora uses categories like 'displayed instrumental proficiency', whereas last.fm can pick up on impossible to calculate vaguaries of taste, consistently throwing up left-field suggestions that may have nothing obvious to do with what you're listening to, but nevertheless make sense compared to the entire range of music you listen to. Then there's the charts, the neighbours system, the groups, the dashboard...oh man it is so superior I don't even understand why it's an argument.

amok:
Pandora annoys me because it tries to be all clever in selecting the bands then comes up with something completely irrelevant. If it's got a broad range of material, or a functional method of linking bands, it's never displayed either for me.

LastFM is where it's at.

Peter Harris:
I am beginning to see a near consensus...

Fiddler:
I've had more or less the same experience with Pandora as everyone else.   The only band that its ever managed to show me anything similar to is Minus the Bear and even then I had to ban a bunch of songs before it worked.

ScrambledGregs:
I put Can into Pandora and it kept giving me garage rock compilations from the '60s and '70s. It was OK music, but not a damn thing like Can whatsoever. This just shows that trying to break music down with science, and then recommend you music based on the elements they feel the music is made of, is a misguided idea that fails utterly. Keep chemistry where it belongs: with chemicals.

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