Music recommendation round-up

Awhile back we linked to a head-to-head comparison of music recommendation sites Pandora and Last.fm (to refresh your memory, Last.fm came out on top) . Of course, Pandora and Last.fm aren't the only fish in the sea, and ExtremeTech is running a round-up review of eight similar services: MusicStrands, Liveplasma, UpTo11.net, Audiri, Pandora, Mercora, Yahoo! LAUNCHcast Radio, and Last.fm. They ranked the services not only on the quality of their recommendations, but also on usability, diversity of their libraries, and community features. I'll admit that I haven't even heard of a couple of those services (though UpTo11.net gets points for the cheeky name), but ExtremeTech is nothing but thorough. In the end most of the services get high marks (excepting LAUNCHcast, that comes out with a score of 5/10 for ads and low sound quality), but in the end Last.fm beats out the others with a score of 9 and high praise: "by far the best out there, possessing a huge library of music, a great community, and a recommendation feature that will blow you away." Pandora comes in second, also with a score of 9, but falls short due to the lack of community and the songs-per-hour limit.

[Via Waxy.org]

Tags: audiri, extremetech, last.fm, lastfm, launcast, liveplasma, mercora, music, musicstrands, pandora, recommendations, review, roundup, social, upto11, yahoo