

Registration and Social Networking in Last.fm vs Pandora This is a different method to discover new music from Last.fm's but also has its advantages and works well. Based on a user's stated preferences, the service plays songs that have similar musical qualities to the songs the user likes. Pandora's service understands the different attributes of all songs (like vocal harmony, rhythmic patterns, electric rock instrumentation). Pandora utilizes a different method to find music that the user will like. In January 2014, Last.fm teamed up with Spotify to give users the ability to play any song from Spotify's catalogue while browsing artist, album, or song pages on Last.fm. This can be a good way to discover new music even though Last.fm does not necessarily "understand" the intrinsic attributes of the songs. This means that if a user has indicated certain preferences, song selection is based on what other users who have similar preferences have liked. Last.fm chooses songs based on crowdsourcing and the site's community features (they call it scrobbling). In both services, users provide feedback on the songs that play and the service remembers this feedback and plays songs based on it. While both Last.fm and Pandora aim to play songs that the service "predicts" the user will like, the algorithm they use to make that prediction is different.

Last.fm vs Pandora: Determining what songs to play
