TS: Pandora vs Last.fm

I've tried a variety of stations with mixed success. The best ones so far have been a "Tears of Rage" (The Band version) station that's giving me lots of great piano rock, a Reverend James Cleavland station that plays lots of great old gospel, and a Paulinho da Viola station which plays good samba, though it's from a pretty narrow range of artists.

I've had mixed success with a Mahavishnu Orchestra station -- I tend to hate everything it plays that isn't Mahvishnu Orchestra or Billy Cobham -- and with a "Thin Line Between Love and Hate" station -- it kept playing me really happy piano-y shit when I wanted dark, simmering stuff.

This Heat radio was something of a failure -- "Repeat" seems to be the only album it has by then and the other stuff it plays lacks the hot beats of This Heat.

The Gillian Welch and Vashti Bunyan stations both play almost entirely irritating coffeehouse crap, but I guess that's predictable.

http://pandorafm.real-ity.com/

I like last.fm just because I get a kick out of monitoring what I listen to, but I enjoy Pandora radio more than last.fm radio. Pandora results seem more relevant, and last.fm's radio doesn't have a pause button, which is incredibly lame.

But I will also endorse PandoraFM.

I tend to use Pandora a lot more. I've mentioned before that I don't download music at all really, so I've found Pandora to be better for checking out an individual artist that I'm not familiar with, vs. checking stuff that's similar to an artist I already know.

For example, a Pandora station of Band X will play a pretty decent amount of Band X, along with similar Bands Y, Z, etc, whereas in my experience a Last.fm station of Band X won't really play all that much Band X at all and will instead just play stuff similiar to Band X. Pandora does both.

I haven't found one to be better than the other, though, in terms of recommending similar stuff. Plenty of solid hits and totally-off misses on both sites. I guess one advantage of Last.fm, though, is that there doesn't seem to be a limit (as far as I know) to how many times you can skip songs if they're not any good.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/15/AR2008081503367.html

Giant of Internet Radio Nears Its 'Last Stand'
Pandora, Other Webcasters Struggle Under High Song Fees

By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 16, 2008; Page D01

OAKLAND, Calif. -- Pandora is one of the nation's most popular Web radio services, with about 1 million listeners daily. Its Music Genome Project allows customers to create stations tailored to their own tastes. It is one of the 10 most popular applications for Apple's iPhone and attracts 40,000 new customers a day.

Yet the burgeoning company may be on the verge of collapse, according to its founder, and so may be others like it.

"We're approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision," said Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora. "This is like a last stand for webcasting."

The transformation of words, songs and movies to digital media has provoked a number of high-stakes fights between the owners of copyrighted works and the companies that can now easily distribute those works via the Internet. The doomsday rhetoric these days around the fledgling medium of Web radio springs from just such tensions.

Last year, an obscure federal panel ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies.

Traditional radio, by contrast, pays no such fee. Satellite radio pays a fee but at a less onerous rate, at least by some measures. ...

This goes back to what we and many other radio stations went through a few years ago with online royalties. On the Web, my former station has to play voice-only (no music) PSAs in place of the real commercials that run on-air since even the background music of most commercial spots aren't licensed for online play. It's bullshit.

I like Pandora a lot, even getting the subscription for the year. I do notice it tends to play songs I like a bit too often at times, but I suppose that's nit-picky - I did thumb-up them, so I figure Pandora assumes I want to hear those regularly.

I've been introduced to a number of new artists, across quite a few genres. So far I have 24 different stations and I love having the mix of all of them. Makes for a very schizophrenic listening experience.

Just got a Pre phone yesterday (my crappy Trio died a horrible death). Pandora is a free application, so I installed it. It's pretty impressive.

I still love eMusic above stuff like Pandora, since I like to own my music. But the mobility of Pandora Pre lifts one big advantage eMusic had over many competing services. Seems like Pandora has a huge catalogue to draw from, too, and the sound quality is very good considering it's being channeled through a cell phone.

I just upgraded to Pandora One for the higher qualty audio (192k). Only $36/yr and I've been using it a ton lately. Got sick of the crap quality.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/pandora-and-internet-radio-royalty/2013/04/03/b9e57aca-9ac4-11e2-a941-a19bce7af755_story_4.html

Internet radio royalties are tiny. In 2012, Pandora’s royalty payment was about a tenth of a cent each time a song was played, so when you leave it on for an hour, you’re costing the company about 1.65 cents. Yet Westergren projects that big stars such as Drake and Lil Wayne make $3 million a year from Pandora alone, and even a lesser-known artist, such as gospel star Donnie McClurkin, pulls in $100,000. Executives at SoundExchange, the nonprofit group that collects royalties, accuse Westergren of spreading a distortion because 90 percent of artists receive less than $5,000 a year in annual digital royalties.

After the introduction of the Pandora-backed bill, Westergren and Pandora are both the instigators, and the target, of a public campaign, complete with a deluge of competing calls and e-mails to Congress. MusicFirst attacked the proposal in a two-page Politico ad citing the opposition of 133 artists, such as Vince Gill, Bonnie Raitt, Maroon 5 and Britney Spears.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/apple-said-to-be-close-to-streaming-music-deal-report-says-as-pandora-stock-slides/2013/04/05/04acea92-9e18-11e2-a941-a19bce7af755_story.html?wprss=rss_social-postbusinessonly&Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost