Matt Singley is a business process advisor that focuses on social media and UGC sociology. He authors a blog, Singley’s Blog Thoughts, about new (and sometimes old) technologies that can help organizations get ahead.

Each morning you get an obscenely-sized coffee, open your email and turn on your favorite music to lean into the upcoming workday. You are a part of an ever increasing group that starts their day with music and listens until it’s time to go to sleep. In this exploding market of online streaming audio, two companies are leading the way, fighting for a position at the top and looking to earn your loyalty: Pandora and Last.fm.

From a total traffic perspective the sites appear to be pretty close, with Pandora slightly overtaking Last.fm in the early part of 2008.  A closer look at the data however reveals that within the United States, Pandora is dominating in site traffic by almost double. Why the big difference stateside and elsewhere? Pandora is only offered to customers within the U.S. If you are an international reader, it appears the choice for you is obvious; if not, read on.

Let’s get right down to the music selection. I chose a wild mix of genre and popularity and was happy to see that both services not only recognized each artist but also seemed to really understand the type of music that each represented. Pandora started each channel with a song from the artist I selected, but Last.fm played for over an hour and never included them. I love listening to music while I work, so this part of the test was easy for me…I just listened to a lot of music on each service, all day long.

It wasn’t long before I came up with a sweeping generalization: Last.fm plays more Indie music, Pandora leans toward mainstream. As I continued to listen to each channel, I found myself going back to Pandora more and more. The music that was being selected for me just seemed better, it really seemed to understand what I liked. I think what sealed it for me was the inclusion of “Where Is My Mind?” by the Pixies in my Death Cab station. It just felt right.

Each service builds a custom channel based on artists or songs that you chose, and plays music that they think you will like. From an ease-of-use standpoint Pandora came out of the gate strong, I was signed up and listening to songs in less than a minute. I had to stumble around just a bit longer to get going with Last.fm, although it was still a mostly straightforward process.

With both Pandora and Last.fm working hard to create custom playlists for you, it’s important to take a quick look at the technology that is driving these two sites.  Last.fm uses a technique called scrobbling to determine which songs rise to the top and which sink.  Scrobbling begins by downloading their software and ranking the songs that you like. With millions of songs being scrobbled every day, this is a great way to crowdsource popularity.

From the Last.fm website:

Millions of songs are scrobbled every day. This data helps Last.fm to organise and recommend music to people; we use it to create personalised radio stations, and a lot more besides.

Pandora selects music based on The Music Genome Project®, which is the work of “a group of musicians and music-loving technologists.” This seems to be more of an artisan effort, with this group listening to and defining the music, as opposed to the crowdsourcing method.  

Since we started back in 2000, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of tens of thousands of different artists - ranging from popular to obscure - and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.

So which method of determining what you will like is better? Do millions of ratings on songs create a better experience for the listener, or does a select group of people tediously pouring over individual songs yield better results?  Before getting to the bottom line, I want to take a look at more of the overall experience.

Looking at the different UIs of the sites, I was naturally drawn to Pandora. The mostly Flash media player seemed a lot easier to use, and frankly a little sexier than the average looking player offered by the competitor. I was not disappointed with the Pandora interface, as I listened to songs I was able to click through to more information about the artists, album, songs and fans of the music all within the same page. Finding similar information over at Last.fm was certainly possible, but required separate page loads for each category that I wanted to find out about.

In terms of social networking, Last.fm is the clear leader. The media player page is set up like a blog that you can scroll down and leave a “shout” about the track as well as look through what others are saying. Last.fm also does a brilliant job of incorporating events into the play page, such as upcoming concerts and events. Pandora simply doesn’t offer this kind of service.

Pandora and Last.fm both have created iPhone apps that are free. Comments can be made about aesthetics and function, but Pandora easily won the battle with response time. The Last.fm app seemed to slow down quite a bit as I loaded channels but I didn’t have this problem with Pandora, which loaded almost instantly every time.

Designs will change, apps will get updated and new algorithms will be created, but in the end it’s all about the music. Both services offer great things for their users, but one consistently played tunes that I really like. Since it really is all about the music, I’m picking Pandora as the winner in this head to head battle.

Which do you prefer? Tell us in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockPhoto, bns124

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Pandora’s A Social Climber: Major Upgrades Look Like Last.fm, Napster
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