Pandora vs Last.fm

I have been using both systems for a few years and with pandora recently putting a cap(40 hour/month limit ) before you have to start paying I decided I would concider my options. First off I am a man that enjoys my online music so I'm sure that 40 hours a month limit would be hit by me probably within the first week or two. Anyways, lets move onto the comparison



Ease- Tie edge Pandora


Both have the option to just type in an artist name and play a band. It really can't get any easier than that. Unless you can think of an idea that would make more since. I will have to give the edge to pandora though because of the simplicity of the UI. Last.fm is a bit clunky and separated in comparison.


Features- Last.fm

There is no way I could concider this section a fair fight. Last.m contains everything you could think of for a media website. You get your music tracked, you can make friends with other listeners, Read up on pages about your favorite artist and contribute to their wiki style page... The list keeps going and going. One great feature that last.fm has that makes it a pure winner over pandora in my book is the ability to import your library from your desktop media player such as itunes or wmp and import all your data from that into your last.fm library. This means basically any song I actually own I can play online allowing me to play my library without having to chose just an artist or genera. The winner is last.fm by a landslide





Recommendations- last.fm
I went and played about 20 songs each on pandora and last.fm for the artist Shinedown. Now I know you may have a hard time thinking I judged this section biased on my music preference but either way I find the results to make since. Both sites gave me a very similar mix of songs from bands including papa roach, nickleback, staind, and seether. All of these are acceptable, oddly though while last.fm kept to similar bands aside from one or two I had never heard of just for recommendation sake, pandora decided around song 16 it wanted to try and introduce me to some new bands that were stretching the genera a bit. Now some people may think that it's nice to hear new bands but for me I asked for shinedown. If I wanted to hear bands 4 songs in a row that weren't like shinedown I would have chosen a different band. Granted mixing new stuff in one song out of like 10 is perfectly fine with me but don't sit there and try and feed me stuff you like pandora. Anyways bottom line if you are looking for new out there stuff I recommend pandora. If you want to listen to stuff you like guaranteed chose last.fm.

Sound- pandora
Both sites sound great and hiccup very little. But I have noticed last.fm does lag a little bit and get stalled. That's the only reason I'm going to give pandora the win here.

Overall- last.fm
I'm going to leave it at this. It you are looking for a quick easy playlist to build and just listen to music I'd say chose pandora. If you are looking for the ultimate media experience and a more enjoyable time I would have to say last.fm wins hands down. It just has a more friendly system that likes to work around your life and what you do outside of just pressing play on a system. It also allows you to search and play an individual song almost all the time. Something I have never been able to figure out how to do with pandora.