cityofsound — New Musical Experiences:
The overall model of Pandora is a fascinating alternative to Last FM, relying as it does on studied, human expert knowledge rather than software-based inferred connections. It appears to work very well at providing recommendations, which is the stated aim, though Last FM appears to be the more engaging experience and more scalable system. I suspect that welding the two approaches together into one coherent experience would deliver a very powerful system indeed. …
I've been observing myspace's development as a genuinely interesting new music experience. For example, see http://www.myspace.com/arcticmonkeys, in which fans and others can set up sites around bands and artists, containing music, images, and vibrant messageboards. These could develop into some of the more interesting new music experiences, sitting alongside Last FM and Pandora. Compared to the latter two, myspace's sites tend to be more colourful, characterful, shambolic and rich in personality. Music is deployed into this space in the form of embedded media players, with links for lyrics, videos and images alongside. In this sense, context is present as well as the music, albeit in freeform fashion, meaning that these (my)spaces become a form of combined listening/contextual experience. The music here appears as a thin veneer or layer, drifting across the experience. Music one identifies with can be adopted on personal pages within myspace, leading to 'presentation of self' opportunities which are playful and potentially powerful.… It'll be fascinating to see how myspace develops, particularly with the financial and cultural muscle of its new owner, News Corp.
The Guardian on, first, Pandora — and then Pandora and Last.fm:
"It's quite fun just putting it on when you're doing something else but I'm not sure I would use it as a music recommendation site yet," says music writer John Mullen. "It's a bit too random. And I really don't like its pretensions that it is offering some kind of universal truth about music. It just got it wrong for me too often. For example, I put in Nirvana and it was playing bands that would make Kurt Cobain turn in his grave. It's a bit crude. Often, bands that are similar on paper using their method aren't alike in reality. You could say Radiohead and Pink Floyd have similar musical 'genes' but really they create incredibly different music." Pandora is also flawed to the extent that users' personal stations, by definition, are narrowly defined. …
Pandora's top-down approach to music recommendation is in stark contrast to rival Last.fm's bottom-up approach. … "The recommendations work by finding music from users who are similar to you, who we call neighbours," says Last.fm founder, former Austrian radio DJ Martin Stiksel. "We then play you music they have listened to but which you don't have in your profile. So if you have 100 records, and 80 of them are the same, it's very likely you are going to be interested in those 20 that the other person has but which you don't. Pandora relies on a team of experts classifying the music, whereas with us it's the knowledge of the crowd, so to speak. [The crowds] know more about music, in our opinion, than a few experts." …
Both Pandora and Last.fm also have another benefit: artists and labels can submit music - providing a new way for acts to market themselves if they have been ignored by the major record labels. And Stiksel argues that they also offer the potential to steer illegal downloaders into legal ways of accessing music. "We believe in streaming rather than downloading," he says. While the recommendation sites may require fine tuning, he adds, they offer a fantastic way to navigate the ever-larger ocean of music. "In this day and age it's really difficult to find the music you like without having something like a music profile. Sites like this are going to become more and more crucial."
