Battle of the Bandwaves
Fred Wilson has published Comscore data on traffic to Pandora vs Last.fm. The results are very interesting. I had assumed that the two would be pretty much level-pegging. They both do very much the same thing, after all: provide a streaming radio station of new music based on your established tastes. The London-based Last.fm is clearly winning, though, when it comes to traffic:
They don’t do quite the same thing, of course. Pandora employs a team of analysts to describe music in great detail, identifying its characteristics to work out music that’s similar to the tunes or bands you’ve said you like. Last.fm uses a more social, Web 2.0 approach, recommending music that’s listened to by the people who like the same music as you.
In my opinion, the worth of the selections that appear according to each approach is very much a matter of taste. The Pandora approach is likely to give you more of the same, while last.fm seems to give more variety. On the other hand, I seem to get more obscure music out of Pandora than last.fm. That might be a good thing or a bad thing, of course, depending on how conservative your tastes are.
I’d actually suggest that the difference in traffic isn’t about the quality of the suggestions the two services provide at all. It’s because last.fm is a lot more than a music recommendation engine. It’s a social network about music. It has all the features you’ll find on MySpace: profiles, groups, friends, messaging, introductions, blogs and more. In other words, you don’t just go to last.fm to find music. In fact, since their player is a downloadable application that contacts the server independently of the web, there’s no reason to go there at all, if all you want is new music. What they’ve managed to do is tap into a pretty common urge - the desire to tell other people about that great new album you just found.
Creating a much broader, communal social experience out of streaming music seems to win-out over expert selection in this test. Are DJs everywhere quivering in their boots, though, expecting to be ousted in favour of an intelligent jukebox? I suspect not. In the radio broadcast and club world, it is they who turn a series of tunes into a social experience.