Last.fm is a cross between Pandora, Launchcast and Myspace. Only, it’s much better looking than all of them combined. (Okay, Pandora isn’t THAT bad, but Last.fm looks much better.)
What separates Last.fm from Pandora is that (1) it has an entire website interface, instead of just a small Flash application, (2) it determines music not by fancy musical terms like “mixed male and female vocal harmonies” but by what other people like (like Launchcast) and by what YOU listen to, (3) it primarily plays music through a desktop application, as opposed to an online player (although it does have a very simple flash one online for people who are just weird like that.)
Last.fm (that’s the website link “.fm” is like “.com”) is two things: It’s an online social network where you can discover new artists, meet people with similar music tastes, learn about bands though a user-created and maintained wiki system, view your listening patterns, and blog about your favorite music. And then it’s also a desktop application - much like Pandora, but and actual downloadable app, and so much better looking.
I feel like I didn’t expand on the part where it determines music based on what you listen to. A feature called “Scrobbling” allows you to download official plugins that can basically watch any music player out there for what you listen to. So if I listen to Good Charlotte in iTunes, then it will note that and incorporate into my “Recommendation Radio.” Unfortunately, this means no rating system. You can just mark a song as “Love” which basically just flags it so you can do more research later or just “Ban” which, well, it bans it.
Another problem with Last.fm is that in the free version you can’t really “create your own radio station” - you just set up a stream based on a series of tags/artists. For instance, if I want music from artists like “Good Charlotte” and “Green Day” I would mark them and create the stream, though it’s not permanent - you can’t customize it into an actual “station” like you can on Launchcast unless you have the special account for special people who are rich and did I mention special? This may seem like a bad thing at first, but it’s good because then you can choose exactly what type of things you want to hear everytime.
Oh, and one more thing: Launchcast allows you to pause music after 30 seconds and skip to the next song a certain amount of times each hour. Pandora is the same, only you can pause from the beginning of the song. Last.fm on the other hand has no pause button BUT you can skip unlimited songs (I think) which is pretty cool.I personally love Pandora, but when compared to Last.fm’s really good looking interface and more advanced features, it’s not what I click on anymore when I want to discover some new music. So I highly recommend Last.fm. Although it’s a bit different from Launchcast and Pandora, and has some downsides, it has some pretty cool features and it’s just altogether a nicer experience for me.
looks cool
http://openpandora.blogspot.com/ is a desktop app fro Pandora. Also, Foxytunes for Firewfox allows you top control Pandora. The one thing I don’t like about Last.fm — I always forget to open the app whe I play my music. I tried out iLike (ilike.com), which is like Last.fm and is a sidebar for iTunes, but it’s annoying and I never used it, so I got rid of it.
I’ve been using Last.fm for a while with the iScrobbler plugin for iTunes. You just play music in iTunes and it automatically watches what you play and sends it to last.fm. Recently I started getting a lot of spam in my last.fm inbox, mostly of the Nigerian scam variety, so I had to set my privacy so others can’t contact me.
I’ve also started using the iLike sidebar. I find the two have very different statistics, since iLike seems to use iTunes play counts for all time, rather than only what you’ve played since you installed it, although iLike’s play counts are very different than what iTunes shows. I have a large iTunes library and I play it on shuffle most of the time, so my artist lists are all over the place and probably throw off their reccomendations
If you want to compare the two:
http://www.last.fm/user/mike3k/
http://alpha1.ilike.com/user/Mike_C3