Last.fm vs Pandora

Ian's been roadtesting Last.fm and Pandora, and rates both of them pretty highly. His head-to-head comparison of Cocteau Twins-based recommendations was particularly interesting. The main reason I prefer Last.fm / Audioscrobbler is a philosophical one - Last.fm uses the listening habits of other people to feed me recommendations; Pandora uses a system based on categorisations by expert musicologists. Music is a social activity, so I prefer my recommendations to come from a social network. The same argument applies to folksonomies (and taxonomic categorisation in general). Assuming the quality of recommendations from both are similar, the philosophical question remains: is everyone equally capable of making sense of the world, or are some better qualified to do it than others?

Posted by monoman at 04:08 PM on August 15, 2005