URL:

http://www.pandora.com

What is Pandora?

Pandora is a free service that allows you to listen to music the way you want.   Start by typing an artist or favorite song.  Pandora will start playing that song.  If you like the song, give it a ‘thumbs up’, if you dislike it, give it a ‘thumbs down’.  Over time it will build a radio station of music that you like, playing just what you want to hear.  Imagine listening to a radio station of your favorite songs and new songs that you all like?!  Pandora solves this for you.

What you may not know about Pandora

Registering an account with Pandora allows you to save your radio stations and you can then access them from anywhere on the internet.  The more you listen to your radio stations, the more custom they become to your musical tastes.  Furthermore, if you’re into different genre’s of music, create different stations for each of your genre.  As a user of Pandora, you’re musical likes and dislikes contribute to the Music Genome Project, which is a continuing evolving music recommendation system that relates songs and artists to each other, based on what the users listen too.

Here’s a quick video on Pandora:

URL:

http://www.last.fm

What is Last.fm?

Last.fm is a social music community that keeps you in touch with your music using a music recommendation system called “Audioscrobbler”, Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user’s musical taste by recording details of all the songs the user listens to, either on the streamed radio stations or on the user’s computer or some portable music devices. This information is transferred to Last.fm’s database (”scrobbled”) via a plugin installed into the user’s music player. The profile data is then displayed on the user’s profile page. The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play artists similar to the user’s favourites. (Read more at Wikipedia)

What you may not know about Last.fm

Last.fm has a great piece of software for your computer that will recognize your favorite music player, plug in to it, and track the music you listen to.  Over time the music that Last.fm tracks will help determine new music that you are interested in.  Last.fm will compare each artist with other artists in the system based off of what users are listening to.  Example, say I listen to Breaking Benjamin, Three Days Grace, and Hinder, another users listens to Three Days Grace, Breaking Benjamin, and Seether.  Based off of Last.fm’s analysis, you can conclude that listeners of Breaking Benjamin and Three Days Grace like Seether and Hinder.  So now Last.fm can recommend me Seether and the other listener Hinder.  See how that works?  Want to discover new music based off of what you are listening to?  Download Last.fm’s audioscrobbler and discover new music.
Watch this quick video on how to get Last.fm’s audioscrobbler and how it works with your favorite audio player: