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Comment by rgr | Hacker News Reader

I like Pandora a lot but a couple of months ago I switched to last.fm because it gave me more variety. Maybe it's time to check out Pandora again -- though last.fm is still 100% free.

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I just switched to last.fm from Pandora. The last straw was the same video ad for 'Mercy hospital' every single time I changed stations.

I have to admit that listening to last.fm is a completely different experience. There are a much deeper selection of tracks and I was thrilled to hear a 24 minute DJ Shadow song.

I wish pandora the best, and I was ok with the occasional video ad. But every time I change a station? If it was every 3rd time I might have put up with it.

How often are you changing stations? I tend to only change stations every couple of hours, if that often. It seems like frequent station changing defeats the purpose of music discovery, because of how Pandora seems to react when changing stations. If I change a station, listen to an entire song, and then change back, it (seems) to reset the "play things I know skolor likes before branching out into new things". I don't have any data at all on it, but after I have a sufficiently mature station (50+ "liked" songs, or so) it seems to mostly play through 10-20 songs before introducing any new songs I've never heard before.

My main complaint with Last.FM is that it makes me putting a label on what I like in music, and then match that up with how other people label music. I know next to nothing about music, I just know I like certain songs and dislike others (Ok, I know a little more than that, but not much). When I used Last.FM I would pick a genre/tag I liked/artist, listen for a while, and get bored with it because it either sounded exactly the same or else I picked the wrong tag and it turns out that wasn't the factor in the original music I liked.

Coding at my new job I tried out Pandora and after a few days I kept hearing the same music. My test is eclectic and I like hearing folk to jazz to alternative to 80s to etc ... Pandora does not seem to offer this type of station, but Last.fm does as if you trained it via a plug in it knows exactly what genres you like and the artists in those genres.

Also, I use Fire.fm firefox last.fm toolbar which is great as it puts play controls right into firefox and last.fm does not need to be open!

I'm not exactly sure about those particular mixes, but I know I end to get good results mixing genres in Pandora by using the "Add Variety" feature. I also find that keeping the window open and just pausing it stops the repetition, they tend to only repeat songs you really, really seem to like, or they will only once per page load (per station).

Cool thanks. I might give it a try. Though prefer last.fm's toolbar (fire.fm) as no site needs to be open, there are play controls at the bottom of firefox, as well it tells you what's playing. As I code/test within one Firefox window I prefer not to have to switch tabs to control music, learn who is playing, as well heart or ban the track playing. Though maybe Pandora has similar toolbar?

They have a desktop client, but you (apparently) have to be a member for that. I'm not sure about the features, but I would think it would allow for that.

It does, and it works on any platform Adobe Air works on. It's 30-something bucks for a whole year, and totally worth it for not having your music tied to the browser being open.

"last.fm is still 100% free."

Except in other countries than the United States, United Kingdom and Germany.

http://blog.last.fm/2009/03/24/lastfm-radio-announcement

don't forget available outside the US

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