Pandora Vs Slacker
June 18th, 2009, 12:42pm by MikeI’ve been using Pandora for quite a while, but have just discovered Slacker, and decided to do a quick head-to-head. First, a quick summary:
Slacker has pre-programmed stations as well as allowing you to “seed” stations with an artist. The stations (either pre-programmed or user-created) allow you to “fine-tune” the stations by saying how old the songs should be (e.g., “current,” “older,” but not precise years), how popular they are (e.g., album vs single), and how often it plays tracks you’ve identified as favorites when it’s played them before. It plays a 30-second commercial every 5 songs. No info on how it chooses songs, and it’s available on the web, Slacker-branded portable music players, and many phones (but the Pre, at least not yet).
Unlike Slacker, Pandora emphasizes their use of the Music Genome Project to choose similar tracks, and says why it chose the tracks. For example, on the Oasis song “Slide Away” chosen on the Stone Roses station below, it was chosen “because it features electric rock instrumentation, a subtle use of vocal harmony, repetitive melodic phrasing, extensive vamping, and major key tonality.” There are no commercials in Pandora, but if you don’t pay, it stops after an hour (but can be restarted). Pandora is also on the web and lots of phones, including the Pre and iPhone.
In my experience, Slacker has better quality when I’m driving — fewer drops and better quality sound. Pandora seems to scale the quality based on how good the connection is, so if you connect over a slower connection, the quality is pretty bad and stays that way.
So, for choosing songs: I seeded both Slacker and Pandora with “The Stone Roses,” and here’s what it came up with:
Slacker:
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Stone Roses: She Bangs The Drums
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Morrissey: November Spawned A Monster
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The Verve: Judas
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Stone Roses: Love Spreads
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Ian Brown: Keep What Ya Got
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Oasis: What’s The Story Morning Glory
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Doves: Friday’s Dust
And Pandora:
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Stone Roses: Shoot You Down
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Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger
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The Smiths: Cemetry Gates
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The Cure: Close To Me (the crappy remix from Mixed Up)
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Stone Roses: I Wanna Be Adored
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Oasis: Slide Away
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The Cure: Push
Pretty darn similar. Based on my experience with Pandora before, I thought it would give more random bands that “sounded like” Stone Roses based on the Music Genome Data, but that wasn’t the case (strangely, I don’t think that these bands really “sound like” The Stone Roses, but they are definitely in the same genre — making me wonder how much of this Music Genome Project is BS). I own or have owned 7/7 of the Pandora songs, and 5/7 of the Slacker songs.
So, no huge difference there.
The other thing that’s fun about Slacker is the pre-programmed stations, like “80’s alternative,” which can be fine-tuned to just popular songs, and is a lot of fun. It would be hard to build this station in Pandora.
It would be fun if I could feed all of my >6500 iTunes tracks into something and have it generate a station for me that way — playing both music that I have and other stuff it thinks I’d like — sort of automating the Pandora process, and serving as a background against which I could further customize (for example, I could say “Britpop,” and it would interpret it as “Britpop, considering the bands that he likes, so don’t play too much other stuff.”)
June 18th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
I just started using Pandora when I got the Pre (actually signed up on the in-store demo while waiting), and I do enjoy it. The sound quality is fine, or at least well matched to listening while on a bicycle. Actually went nearly two hours without any drops, although there often long pauses between songs, especially when trying to skip a track.
When they release a Pre version of Slacker, I’ll try that too.
June 18th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Also, forgot to mention that Slacker only lets you skip 6 songs per hour (unless you change stations), which is kinda weird — I wonder if somehow this helps them control bandwidth, since there are fewer times that it was to alter the upcoming playlist or something?
June 18th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Personalized radio is great. Yahoo Music did take my whole collection as inputs for assessing my taste for my personal radio station. Unfortunately, looks like I threw my support at a loser, back in the day. Like that movie rating website we all used, back in the day!
Zune goes a step further and let’s you add “influencers” in your profile– So not necesarily friends, but listeners who have similar tastes as you. These are all such good ideas for discovering music. Conceptually, I find the Pandora method the most limiting– you’d never get exposed to music that isn’t similar to what you think you like. OTOH, I could listen to the Stone Roses channel all day (it played that crappy Mixed Up version of Close to Me for me too).
June 18th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
The closest I have to my whole music collection as an input (and arguably, it’s better), is my collected last.fm profile, which is most of what I’ve listened to over the past 4 years.
I’ve used their recommendations to look for music, as well as my what my “neighbors” listen to, but never really listened to their radio offering, especially my neighbors’ station.
Downloaded their iPhone app — it’s not the best as far as buffering (which is why I need a faster iPhone!). Cool that it scrobbles back to my last.fm profile.First 4 songs on Stone Roses radio there:
The Charlatans: My Beautiful Friend
The La’s: Timeless Melody
Happy Mondays: Dennis and Lois
Ride: Decay
Compared to Pandora and Slacker, it’s giving much different recommendations — interestingly, no Stone Roses. Clearly, again, these are from the same genre, though (early 90’s pre-Britpop).
As streaming sources, I now have Pandora, Slacker, last.fm, Simplify Media (for my iTunes music at home), Stitcher (for streaming podcasts from the web) and Flycast (for listening to real radio station streams from around the world). Fun.
June 18th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
You need some multitasking!
June 19th, 2009 at 6:58 am
I think I need more multitasking in my life in general! Or maybe just to spend less time comparing internet radio services!
February 1st, 2010 at 1:23 pm
Just today, Slacker comes to webOS! I’ll check it out soon.