Yeah, that's one of those things about Last.fm. To be honest I was only familiar with this aspect of it until reading this review - basically the "stats system" that reads what people are listening to and reports it. That didn't seem terribly interesting to me, it doesn't inherently help you find new, good music. It seems like Last.fm does have some other faclities for finding new tunes, but Pandora seems much more purpose-built for this. That's part of why I'm kind of annoyed at this review for its focus on the community aspect. There are lots of "music communities" that can help you find new music through peer recommendation, many of which aren't reviewed here (they don't qualify on all points in most cases). I kind of think of a "music recommendation site" as a place that has some custom system that *itself* recommends new music, so going into the review I was expecting to see some other cool technical solutions like Pandora's. To be honest I was excited to see what others might be doing along these lines - sophisticated technical solutions. Most of them aren't though, they're just regurgitations of existing systems, often times based in the likely-to-be-highly-flawed individual perception and opinion of non-experts. Not that only experts can determine what good music is, but the premise of Pandora is that people like music for a reason and that you can find out scientifically what that reason is. I think that's exciting, more so than any other project, and it seems to work fairly well in practice. Even if it does slip up sometimes the sheer promise and idea of it is IMO far more worthwhile to support than most of the other examples.
- Oshyan
