Solo Technology

Posted on November 10, 2005   One Comment

Stumbled over two different projects today that have related goals – help you find music to listen to that you like. And, after playing with both for just a little, I think they’re both on the right, albeit different, tracks.

First, I saw this post over at TechCrunch mentioning that Pandora now had a free/ad-supported option. I’d never heard of it, but the author’s comments and obvious enthusiasm were enough to intrigue me. But down in the comments for that blog I saw mention to Last.fm, another one I’d never heard of… Well, as I’m constantly on a quest for new/varied music (have I mentioned I love my xmRadio?), I figured both of these needed a look.

I mucked around with Last.fm a bit this afternoon while working on some projects for work, but found it demanded just a bit more attention to get rolling than anticipated and was causing attention-span issues (and I’m already the ADD poster-child!). So I started with Pandora.

Pandora’s pretty slick and very approachable — quite easy to figure out and get rolling with. It runs as a Flash app, either in their home page or as a small window (I prefer the latter, actually). Create a station by specifying a song or group you like and it pretty much takes it from there. However, you can broaden things a bit and add other songs/groups to your station. It draws all of its data from the “Music Genome Project” and, thus far, does a damned good job of finding stuff I like by groups I’ve never heard of or wouldn’t have considered as likely!

For this afternoon I set up a channel based on Rush, then added Triumph, Iron Maiden and Deep Purple to it. Simply incredible… I now have several channels defined, one that covers many of the bands I’ve loved over the years (lot’s of hair and hard rock) and a few that are quite different. For instance one channel is going towards “progressive rock” (Dream Theater, King Crimson and The Mars Volta as the seeds) and another channel headed more for a genre I can’t quite describe, but I seeded it with William Topley and Steve Earle just to see what I’d get. If any readers get into this, let me know – apparently we can email our channels to each other!

I’ve read some complaints about the depth of the library, but I’ve not been using it long enough to comment there (although looking at the artists I’ve thrown at it so far, it can’t be too shallow…). The user interface is incredibly approachable and intuitive. Yes, the free version is ad supported — and they’re still figuring out how they’re going to do that, so right now there uh.. well… aren’t any ads! I’ll enjoy that while it lasts.

Ok, so what about Last.fm? This one is more of a “social” tool. Essentially you again select a band or 3 that you like and it’ll select songs that it feels match. Now the difference is that instead of the music genome project that Pandora touts, Last.fm is a tagging app. As the songs play, you give them tags. Over time, after you’ve tagged enough songs (that you like of course) you start to get musical “neighbors” — oh, and you can join “groups” of like-minded people. From neighbors you can gain additional influences in your tagged music channels. I had to do a lot more clicking around with this one to figure it out!

When you start (as a windows user) you get the Last.fm player and a plug-in for your mp3 player of choice. You can use the plug in to tag music you already have on your machine as you listen to it. Or, you can get started with the stand-alone player (which is easier to use than Pandora’s but not as aesthetically pleasing imho) and keep the web site open so that you can tag the songs as they’re played. It doesn’t take too much to start seeing the “network” form, but it obviously demands a lot more attention from you to get it rolling.

The library seems very extensive — heck, they even knew about the band “Tuff” . As you’re tagging songs that have been played, you get stats of how many others have heard that song vs. something else on the same album and some other similar factoids. It also shows you how others have tagged the song. All apparently very deep and rich.

Long term I see a lot of potential with the Last.fm stuff. There’s just so much there! Short term though, I just can’t beat Pandora – it’s very easy to get up and get rolling right off the bat. Time will tell, however, about the depth of the library and variety.

Tags: last.fm, music, pandora

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