I’ve been using Pandora, the “music discovery service” powered by the Music Genome Project, on and off during the past year and today took a look at how it compares against a similar service, Last.fm. Pandora allows you to create radio stations based on your artist and song preferences and plays music you may not have heard based on those preferences. While it has some social networking features, Last.fm has more robust social features, and has a downloadable application for playing music. The market share of US visits to Pandora increased by 634% from November 2005 to November 2006, while the market share of visits to the Last.fm website (not including use of the application) increased by 172% in the same period. For the week ending December 16, 2006, Pandora and Last.fm ranked at number 8 and 9 respectively in the Hitwise Entertainment – Radio category.

While both sites are ad-supported, they also link to Amazon for music retail. Last.fm appears to be generating more interest in purchases, as 6.35% of its downstream traffic for the week ending December 16, 2006 went to Amazon, compared to only 0.58% of Pandora’s downstream that went to Amazon.
There are also differences in the demographics of users of the sites: visitors to Pandora are 51% female/49% males, while Last.fm users skew slightly more female at 56% female/44% male. Last.fm users are also younger than Pandora users, with 57% of its users in the 18-24 and 25-34 age groups, which makes sense given its social networking focus. Pandora users more generally resemble the online population, with 25-34 and 35-44 year olds taking 25% each of its visitors. I think that somehow a name like the Music Genome Project has an appeal to GenXers like myself who are not as interested in networking with new people for music recommendations – I like the idea of leaving it up to ‘scientific’ research to determine what I should listen to, even though sometimes it can be way off base.