archGFX

Last.fm just brought their new site out of beta, and it is completely awesome. aside from just solving my media center extender issue, it looks fantastic, and gets me my fix of album art. But every time i mention last.fm to one of my web savvy friends, they start going on about how they "use pandora, and that's the same/better, right?". It's not.

Service

Pandora is based on the music genome project. The fundamental assumption is that if an expert can describe the discreet elements of most pieces of music, logic can use those elements to find other, similar music, that will be enjoyable to the people who like the original piece of music.

Last.fm is built on those trendy Web 2.0™ ideas: the long tail, tagging, and user profiles. The assumption is that like-minded (people using the same tags, listening to the same music) people will like similar music. so last.fm doesn't set out to describe music at all, just graph trends of who listens to what, and what tags they use to describe it.

Both sites provide a nice web-based music player. Both players pretty well suck at doing "What bands sound like Hot Water Music?" The only music I've found through either radio player, i found through last.fm's 'recommendation radio'. That service only works for people who have an account, and submit tracks to it. As a service, as much as i think letting 'experts' tell you what you should like is a bad idea, right now it doesn't do a whole lot worse.

Scene

Amid recent debate over the future of the music industry, there's mention of music scenes moving out of local record stores. The scene, which in loose terms means 'the way people discover, share, appreciate, and acquire new music', is not moving to pandora. it is moving to myspace, mp3 blogs, and last.fm. Why last.fm and not pandora?

I have a profile on last.fm. I write journals, it shows people what I listen to, What I tag, and who i go to shows with. The music i've found on last.fm that i really like, i find through other profiles. I read someone's journal about their favorite metal vocalists (recommended to me because she included Mikael Åkerfeldt ), and found out about Ulver, whose brilliant 'Blood Inside' is now one of my favorite albums. When I first joined the site, i listened to 800 tracks the first week, just so i could have the 'neighbors' feature. when they showed up, I visited all their profiles, and found out they were all listening to Stars, and I wasn't.

This is the sort of stuff that happens at small record stores, and at shows. last.fm and myspace are becoming places for it to happen online, without geographic necessity, and without the sort of condescention you'd normally endure from an indie kid when you haven't heard of the new cool bands.

The Long Tail

Pandora's idea of music experts is not new. Nor is last.fm's idea of finding music from people around you. Pandora's top-down model is the same model as radio, record labels, MTV, and american idol. It's not that liking pop is bad. I've certainly had some 'uncool' taste at times. But liking pop because you've been told it's 'better' is bad. Last.fm's model is the same one as making mix tapes, going to shows, and hanging out in record stores. do yourself a favor.