Last.fm VS. Pandora

I have been really nice and neutral in my comments to date, but I guess its time I document my frustrations.

Before I begin my rant, I would like to reiterate that I am a big fan of Pandora. I use Pandora at work, at home, and wherever whenever I need to listen to some new music. Hence I instinctively compare last.fm to Pandora. And I am sorry to say, last.fm comes a distant second in this race to recommend better music.

Last.fm might have started off as small start up venture with some computer geeks working from a school computer lab. But now it has enough venture capital and corporate sponsorship to rival almost all the big online music radio station out there. So there is no excuse for not polishing their efforts to be at par with the best, if not exceeding them. At least when it comes to basic things like user interface design and consistency of service, one would think that last.fm would try to do its best to serve its huge fan base well.

Where should I begin!?!?! For starters, let’s take the UI. Last.fm can recommend music to you in 2 different ways, one through their radio station on their website (‘play recommendation’ option in the user profile) and the other is through the last.fm client software which you can download and install on your local machine. One would expect these 2 interfaces to have the same look and feel, or at least the same option. On the contrary, there are some option/buttons exclusive to the last.fm client. Does this mean the client is a better option than the online station? Definitely not!!! The client frequently runs out of recommendations, displaying the error message ‘not enough content to play’.

If you think this is weird, wait till you see the online interface. Now the best way to do things would be to have a single radio station UI, and then have the option of selecting what you want to play. But last.fm has so many options, I feel completely lost! And to add this confusion, these options are scattered all over the place. On one page you can play the tracks your neighborhood friends are listening to, or you can play the tracks last.fm recommends for you. On another page, you can create a radio station based on an artist of your choice. Why not combine them all into one single cohesive interface with drop down options???!!! Oh and I forgot to mention, you can also play music tagged with a specific text label, in another page of course.

Now coming to recommendations. Does last.fm seriously consider any of the user feedback? I spend the whole week refining my artist preferences, and at the end of the week, my artist recommendations page shows a whole new bunch of artists. What happened to the list of artist that you showed me last week? Will any of those artists be carried on to the lists for the next week? I just spent a whole week working to get my recommendations straight on with my preferences, and you just wipe all that out and ask me to start off with a new bunch of choices?? I mean CMON &#^!~@%#%^!@#!!!!!

Now coming to Pandora, though its internal working might be totally different from that of last.fm (content based recommendations), Pandora does an excellent job at providing a usable and useful UI. Thumbs up/down to rate, select track/artist to start a new station, and not to mention the extremely useful info displayed with every recommendation, that briefly states the reason why that artist/song is playing on my station.

Pandora might not have all the social networking features that last.fm provides, but then again all this is about listening to some good music. Yes I would love to socialize with people who have music tastes similar to mine, but that’s just one of things I would like to do to get more likable music into my jukebox. And if last.fm cannot do that effectively and without causing a headache, I would rather prefer tuning into the local radio station of my choice!

At the end of the day, it is unfair to compare Pandora with last.fm, last.fm is trying to create a social networking space for music lovers, and Pandora is trying to create a jukebox of your favorite music based on analysis of musical attributes. Having a panel of music experts recommend music to you (pandora) and having your friends choose your music are 2 very different things. But that’s no excuse to not provide a functional piece of software!

Sorry for being so critical of last.fm, but I have had a tough time trying to get what I want from last.fm I wish things were much simpler. But that’s just me.

I haven’t explored last.fm to its full potential yet, and I hope in the future things improve.

Links: Excel sheet sumamrizing last.fm analysis