Pandora and Last.fm: Nature vs. Nurture in Music Recommenders:
An excellent
comparison of Last.fm and pandora.com by Steve Krause . An extremely thourough review. Ultimately I still think the DigitalPimp idea is to open-source the music distribution database and technology, be as digital rights technology agnostic as possible, and sell the usage date to the record companies and artists.
It would also be nice to create a visual interface to the Last.fm and pandora.com systems like
LivePlasma . These visual interfaces allow you to visually see multiple relationships quickly and the user could "point" the music player in the direction they would want to travel rather than having the system randomly playing a somg the listener may have no interest in listening to.
AllMusic.com also does a nice job of visuallizing music trees that could be used as well for exploration. But as stated in
Steve Krause's article "I found Last.fm better than Pandora at delivering songs that I liked or at least didn't feel compelled to skip, which is the most important thing when I'm listening while doing something else" the visual approach would be more for people in the drivers seat interacting more with the service rather than passively listening.
Agreeing with Steves Pandora's promise if they were merely able to add tagging for the users Web 2.0 style and then they could allow users to quickly and efficiently roughly tag new incoming music... speeding up the process for them Pandora could then focus most of their energy on categorizing the music that is really unique or is fitting across multiple tags. Sort of what Malcolm Gladwell talked about in his
Kenna example in
Blink (
discussion) These systems need to get the artificial intelligence to Thin-Slice music to its essential qualities and genre's and quickly pass it on to the new listener.
What-if Pandora just created a plug-in for
MySpace .Im really more of a
Friendster user (shows my Gen-X) not Gen-Y as in MySpace (
Its really for music anyway -
Myspace-music)
