On Friday, April 28th, Neil Young’s new protest album, “Living with War”, will be made available for free internet streaming on his website, www.neilyoung.com. One song on the album calls for impeaching President Bush. Another song is called “Lookin’ for a Leader”. Some of the lyrics in this song go, “Someone walks among us … and I hope he hears the call. And maybe it’s a woman, or a black man after all.”
In just a few minutes of trying out Pandora this morning, I’ve discovered three artists I like. I had never heard of any of them before. I’ve been able to do the same on Last.FM, but only within a more popular circle of artists. Last.FM, being a social recommender, is bound to be biased toward more popular artists, in comparison to Pandora. I was skeptical of the music genome project upon first learning of it, but so far, it’s been working well for me. Also, Pandora allows me to listen to a whole song, not just a few seconds of it. I’m going to continue to use both Last.FM and Pandora, but right now, I’m more excited about Pandora. Soon, I’ll add a Pandora blog widget to Squirrel Tao.
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.
