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.

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Possibly related:

• Pandora Goes Social
• The last.fm post
• Pirate Nation: Two-​​​​Thirds Share Music