Been using it for a little while now and like Pandora need to use it a lot more but in quick comparison they are pretty much the same thing so I now have two personalised new music discovery services to help me find more music to buy which is Fab !
Of course running two at the same time is ok but I only have one set of ears, there are slight differences in setup, Last.fm needs a small download and always launches seperately (which I like) whereas Pandora is contained in the web page (unless you launch it an a popup) and has no download, pick your poison on that one, plus you can't resize either one
Last.fm allows multiple artist/track setup in the first step where as Pandora picks one to start with but you can then add more so ends up being the same, additionally Pandora will create a station from an individual track where as Last.fm asks for Bands or Artists, I tried to set up a "Rez/Cowgirl" station in Last.fm and got a not enough data to play this station error followed by a player crash
Last.fm plays one at a time so you have to create one each time you want to try it out where as Pandora allows multiple stations to be stored and accessed by one click,. up to 100 I think
The big plus for Last.fm right now is that the history of what I have played is kept right along with all my other Audioscrobbler history which is fab, Pandora have a station history feature coming but no news on Audioscrobbler type functionality - huge win for Last.fm here
Last.fm is slower to load and respond than Pandora but most likely due to the much bigger traffic Last is getting right now since Pandora is a closed invite system, I do get pauses in the music from Last and no such delay in Pandora
Pandora allows you to share a station with a friend direct from the player, can't find that on Last.fm but if you go to the Last.fm radio site you can see everyone playing it and browse what they are listening to, of course this highlights the community / social side of Last.fm brought over from Audioscrobbler
Also found that there are a few features you can upgrade to get from Last.fm including Discovery mode
More radio options including launching a radio station on your tags, guaranteed streaming slot (which would solve the problems mentioned above I guess) and perhaps most importantly you get a different colour icon :)
Now the interesting bit, launch Cocteau Twins on both and what do you get:
Last.fm ->
Dif Juz
Mortal Coil
Love Spirals Downwards
Cranes
David Thomas
The Telescopes
Crime & The City Solution
Hooga Booga
Cocteau Twins
The Telescopes
Dif Juz
Pandora ->
Drop the fear
Cocteau Twins
Jann Arden
Cocteau Twins
Cocteau Twins
Elastica
The Passions
The Sugarcubes
Area
Elbow
Lush
It's kind of tough switching between the two and still trying to follow along but then I realised that it should all be the same sort of music across both so it became easier.
Early reaction is that they both get it as right and as wrong as each other when it comes to matching the style of music, which in this case is pretty tough, Pandora played more Cocteau Twins than Last but after banning and liking tracks on each one I started to get a better feed, to me at least but in both there were oddities, The Telescopes are much heavier and rock than anything I've heard the Cocteau Twins do
Will continue do to more testing as it's really good fun finding new music so it's hardly a chore but in summary for now I prefer Pandora but will stick with Last.fm because it helps build my musical profile which I like. On that note I see Last.fm has jumped on the tagging bandwagon but personally I don't see the appeal but as mentioned before I don't believe in genre either so that's probably why. I suppose an aggregated view of what users refer to as rock could yield some interesting results but I see no practical use in it myself
Technorati Tags:ikisai / last.fm / Audioscrobbler / Music
