P.C. Shannon

It looks like Internet radio will survive, but it’s not out of the doghouse yet (see savenetradio.org for all the gory details). In the past, I’ve regarded this issue with only passing curiosity—just another example of how old media doesn’t get new media—but this time around, I actually have a bit of a stake in it. I’ve been exploring Internet radio as a source for discovering new music, simply because I’m getting pretty desperate for new tunes but can’t afford to put any money towards expanding my collection. So I’ve pitted the two top, free “find new music” services against each other: Last.fm versus Pandora.

The two services are very different beasts. Last.fm relies on its “audio scrobbler” service to recommend artists based on similiarities between your listening habits of those of the other users in its database. Pandora, on the other hand, draws on something called the “music genome project“, which aims to define the attributes of individual songs agnostic to genre, popularity, or other conventions.

Out of the gate, I found Last.fm to be frustrating. It takes a while for it to build up a profile and start recommending stuff. But I wanted new music now! What I really wanted was a Netflix-style tool so I could browse through their database and rate artists, songs, and albums. When I did get around to getting recommendations, they were off-kilter. I kept getting Black-Eyed Peas songs—I guess because I’m gay for JT.

Pandora rocked from the get-go. Nothing to download (Last.fm needs to install a plugin for your music player so they can scrobble your listening). It just asks for your favorite artist or song, plays on of their tracks, and then plays something else it thinks you’ll like. In my case, the second track it played kicked ass and it was from an artists I’d never heard of.

Pandora, however, does have a habit of taking some strange turns. If it plays something you love or hate, you can tell it, and it uses this information to further refine your station. This can be a problem because the algorithm seems to employ a reductionist approach: if you tell it you like two artists, then it focuses primarily on the attributes that those artists share when selecting additional tracks. The more songs you give the thumbs-up to, the fewer qualities it uses. I found it necessary to carefully manage the “love” and “hate” lists for each station and to restrain myself from giving a positive score to every that sounded good. Then again, I can be a bit of a perfectionist and control freak when it comes to music.

Last.fm, in contrast, seems to only improve the longer I use it. Given the way it works, this makes sense. I haven’t heard the Black Eyed Peas in a long time, and it keeps pulling tracks that I know and love but haven’t listened to since I started scrobbling.

In the final analysis, there’s no clear winner in this battle. I’m prejudiced in favor of Pandora because I like the way their algorithm works, whereas just because I like Interpol and JT doesn’t mean that another Interpol is going to want to bring sexy back. I’m sure that’s a gross oversimplification of how Last.fm works, and I have yet to find any objective reason to dismiss their service.

It should be said that neither service is terribly good for checking out a particular artist that you’ve heard about; they’re really geared towards discovering those artists, not exploring artists’ catalogs. Nonetheless, both are valuable services that I will continue to use for sometime. Hopefully Congress will do the right thing and save Internet radio.