I just got done reading Pandora and Last.fm: Nature vs. Nurture in Music Recommenders. It was a very interesting blog article entry about the differences between the way that Pandora and Last.fm work. Steve Krause compares Pandora’s workings to nature and Last.fm’s to nurture. Pandora treats musical attributes like melody and lyrics as genes. It calls its music database the Music Genome Project. Last.fm, in contrast, works by social recommendation. It doesn’t just rely on people to manually enter the music they’re listening to. It actually tracks the music they listen to, in order to gain more reliable data as a basis for recommendations. Krause appreciates the pros and cons of both Pandora and Last.fm, but he seems to think that Last.fm delivers better on its promises than Pandora does, at this time.