Jason Murphy

Pandora vs. Slacker vs. Last.fm

Sep 17, 2008 Geeks and Gadgets, Unordered Miscellany

Years ago, before Napstergate and the dot bomb bust, my favorite website was a streaming music service called Echo.com (don’t go there now, it’s a logistics company now. Check out the archive here instead). There really has been nothing like it since. It was basically a “personalized” radio, but you were able to invite friends to join your station and chatroom and while there share the same stream with you. Anyone could vote thumbs up or down on a song, and if the majority of voted thumbs down on a song, it would skip and go to a different song. I spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours creating the ultimate radio station with my friends popping in at any given time. When Echo.com announced that they closed their doors, I was simply heartbroken.

Today there are several services that offer the streaming “personalized” radio similar to Echo. The major players are Pandora, Slacker, and Last.fm. All of which offer personalized radio stations, though none offer the true social component like Echo did. A couple do have “friend” capabilities, but it is very limited what friends can do. However, as far as creating a station around tastes that you like, I think all of these services have evolved tremendously in the past few years.

Another cool feature is that some of these stations will travel with you offline. Pandora offers several ways to make your music portable, via mobile phones (including the iPhone) and stereo add-ons like the Logitech Squeezebox series. Slacker has a cool offline offering too: a proprietary wi-fi enabled player.

I have been a long-time Pandora user, fan and supporter. There have been so many times where the music Pandora offered had matched my mood that it could have created a mashup album. Some of the suggestions are pure genius (although I’ll admit sometimes it can be off). Example of a perfect match: The Beatles “Blackbird” playing on my Modest Mouse station. Another example: Led Zeppelin on my Pearl Jam station. Want another example? Check out my bookmarked songs, you’ll see a few different patterns.

Even though I’m a fan of Pandora, I decided that during the next week or so I’m going to give the other two a valiant test. I’ve used Last.fm a few times. I think I finally understand their UI. Slacker is much easier to use, but I just never got around to creating an account for their free web-based player. I’ve done that now and tomorrow will be the first full day of Slackerdom.

I’ll post my observations on the services, once I feel I’ve observed something.

Tags: echo.com, last.fm, pandora, slacker