last.fm / Pandora
Streampad blog — last.fm vs. Pandora:
Pandora is a Web1.0 company. Don’t let the Flash fool you. They have a top down approach to choosing which music is right and a belief that eyeballs on their site alone will be enough to sustain them.
last.fm is a Web2.0 company. They leverage people (also known as the edge, user-generated, wisdom of the masses) to choose the right music. As a result, their database of songs is significantly larger than Pandora’s. Are they better at choosing music than Pandora? It doesn’t really matter. They are both pretty damn good. But last.fm has a scalable model. Pandora does not. In terms of an economic model, neither is doing anything but losing money, I assume.Last.fm has all the community aspects. Pandora just added a “sharing” feature, if you could call it that. They allow users to “bookmark” a song which sets up a page where they and others can listen to 30 second samples of their bookmarked songs. 30 second samples will never, ever cut it. Last.fm clearly wins here. I will not even mention the audioscrobbler service (which is much more important to me than the radio service).
Looking back on this post, I now realize how much more I like last.fm as compared to Pandora. Their problems are purely technical. Their head is in the right place. Pandora has the technical stuff worked out. Their head is just on backwards. Technical problems are usually easier to fix than philosophical/economic ones.
