There has been a raging debate as to whether Last.fm or Pandora is the better personalized radio service. Fred Wilson started it off with his first post in which he claims Last.fm is hands-down the winner and just recently posted a follow-up affirming his view. David Porter has the best analysis of the matchup so go visit his post as he breaks it down better than I ever could.
I agree with Fred and David. Don't get me wrong. Pandora is a very well-executed, slick application and I have enjoyed playing around with it. But, as I've written before, I prefer the human touch, and that means I prefer Last.fm's approach. That said, Last.fm's player was buggy -- it mutes when I bring my Firefox window into focus (though it doesn't do this for any other kind of window including IE) -- how strange.
I like Pandora's web-based player better but, overall, Last.fm gives me better results because it has the human touch. I hope they can somehow integrate it with Rhapsody, YMU or Napster (in that order). When I see "neighboring" tracks when browsing Last.fm, I'd love to listen to them on-demand (open APIs anyone?)...Probably what Yahoo! had in mind when purchasing Lucas Gonze/Webjay.
Why do you think no one is comparing these to LAUNCHcast, which has been #1 in this space for about 6 1/2 years?
Posted by: Todd B. | January 31, 2006 at 08:26 PM