I’m sure most of you know of the two top music sharing services – Pandora and Last.fm. They both use various methods to supply you with a playlist that you (hopefully) like, and fund themselves with ads and/or paid membership. The music quality on both services is really indistiguishable, so what I think the real deciding factor is the music selection.
Let’s face it, Pandora has a much better system for figuring out who wants what. Their “music genome project” learns your preferences faster than Last.fm’s scrobbling by far, and it tends to get more music that you may have heard of. Last.fm, in comparison, tends to have a lot more indie artists – both a good and a bad thing.
However, there are some caveats to Pandora: first of all, its only available in the United States. While that isn’t so much of a restriction for us, the fact is, you’ll have to use Last.fm or some other internet radio in the case that you go on vacation outside the country.
There is one real reason why I personally choose Last.fm over Pandora – their respective music libraries. Last.fm gives me much better music when i search for “classical” or “instrumental” – since neither are arguable popular, it is understandable why Pandora doesn’t spend effort on them. Also, Pandora has just about no songs in other languages – a search for “Jolin Tsai” returns zero results, while Last.fm easily compiles a list of Chinese artists to listen to.
Overall, my personal choice leans towards Last.fm… but if you don’t need multiligual music listenable outside the country, Pandora’s your best bet.