Top 5 Online Music Streaming Services: The Velvets Test
This week is Online Music Week at Read/WriteWeb, so I decided to check out how the leading music streaming services compared. I used this week's poll to determine the top 5 apps. As of writing, the top 5 are quite a bit ahead of the the rest of the services in our poll. They are: last.fm, Pandora, Yahoo Music, iTunes Music Service and Rhapsody.
To test each of the above 5 services, I wanted to see if my favorite band - The Velvet Underground - could be found. And if so, did it play similar artists or have some way for me to 'personalize' my music listening experience? After all, personalization is a big part of 'web 2.0'. So here goes...
last.fm
I use last.fm a lot and one thing it does very well is provide a custom music stream based on an artist. Here are the first 5 songs that came up for VU:
1. Head Held High by The Velvet Underground
2. Havalina by Pixies
3.
Beautiful by Smashing Pumpkins
4.
Getchoo by Weezer
5.
Das Lied Der Deuschen by Nico
All of those songs were to my liking and were an appropriate mix of modern Alt rock and arty pop (the Nico track). In other words, very much in the spirit of VU.
All up, a very solid 4.5/5 for last.fm.
Pandora
Unfortunately I can no longer access Pandora, as I reside outside the US. This is the message I was greeted with today:
"We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for most listeners located outside of the U.S."
So I asked Josh Catone (who lives on the East Coast of the US) to see what The Velvet Underground resulted in on Pandora. He advised:
1. Rock & Roll by The Velvet Underground
2. No Reply by the Beatles
3. Picture Book by The Kinks
4. Tattoo by The Who
5. Lisa Says by The Velvet Underground
That's a nice, diverse selection. Not as contemporary as last.fm though, with all the Pandora selections being from the 60's and 70's. I give last.fm better marks for 'knowing' that the Velvets influenced virtually every Alt rock band of the 80's, 90's and 21st century. Still, music is timeless and the Pandora songs were all excellent too. One other thing: you'd expect more than five songs before another VU song is played.
My rating: 4/5 (I didn't penalise them for not being available outside the US, as it isn't their fault; but not having anything from the 80's onwards loses them .5 of a point).
Yahoo Music
Alas at this point my experiment started to turn to custard. On the Yahoo Music homepage, I selected "Create radio station" - which took me to their LAUNCHcast Radio service. That gave me a long list of artists to choose from. Ignoring that, I went to the bottom of the page and entered VU as my sole option. Unfortunately... I got the following "Error 5":
Not OS X?! I checked out the Help file, which stated: "Currently, we do not support LAUNCHcast Radio for Macintosh or Firefox on Windows."
At which point I gave up on Yahoo Music. Rating: 0/5 for extreme compatibility incompetence.
iTunes Music Service
I opened my iTunes app and clicked 'Radio'. However, there is no way to enter an artist or search for one. It is a straight list of radio stations. A great selection though, so Apple gets points for that. But when you think online radio these days, it's recommendation and personalization services like last.fm and Pandora that are pushing the boundaries.
So my rating for iTunes music streaming: 2.5/5 (basic and comprehensive in music types, but not innovative).
Rhapsody
Rhapsody has a nice "listen FREE" search option at the top of its homepage, an excellent way to entice people to sign up for its premium service. I typed in "The Velvet Underground" and it took me to a useful bio page. At the bottom of that page I saw a link for The Velvet Underground Channel. Licking my lips, I tried to click on it. And again. And again!! But it was non-clickable for me. Why? Because the service is unavailable outside the US.
Such a promising service, but (as with Pandora) it shows what a legal minefield the online music world is currently - due to the record companies. It defeats the purpose of the World Wide Web if people outside the US can't use it. So I'll reluctantly pass on a rating for Rhapsody (and I didn't want to bother Josh a second time).
Conclusion
I also checked out FineTune and Last365, but neither offered much in the way of Velvet Underground personalization. So for me, it's no contest - last.fm wins, mostly because I can actually access it! But also it does deliver slightly better results than Pandora. I used to use Pandora a lot, back when it was available to me; and found then that last.fm was slightly more diverse and less likely to repeat songs. So last.fm has consistently been the leader in music streaming of the web 2.0 variety (i.e. with recommendations and personalization).
I think Apple could be more innovative with iTunes. You only need to look at The Filter, a playlist service we reviewed earlier this week, to see how iTunes data can be personalized.
And for the love of Lou, I hope that Pandora and Rhapsody can route around those damn record companies soon. I do hate it when Web innovation is blocked due to legal issues.
What do you think? Do the above 5 deliver with your favorite band?
Lou Reed pic by ptufts, at Web 2.0 Summit 2006
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agree last.fm is up there...
but i imeem should be on your list richard. Their pay-per-cast model is clever too...(well snocap's PPC model)
Right, so you did a search on the Velvet Underground.
What about actually trying it out on much more recent bands? or, say, try "bossa" as a genre. you might not be as happy with the results you get.
came a ccross your post via blog friends.
I'm down with your rationale. I used to run a record shop back in the day. when checking out competitors I would go straight to the miles davis section. if they didnt have Bitches Brew and Tribute to Jack Johnson in there I would walk out and forget about them...
You forgot the greatest streaming music site ever...
www.di.fm
Try out the chillout channel. Amazing.
They have the lower bitrate streams for free, and high quality streams for those willing to subscribe.
Available outside the US:
www.ezmo.com
Dude what cave in the Artic do you live in, How did you manage you miss Soundpedia?
I have an account with Rhapsody and listened to The Velvet Underground Channel for you. Here are the first five songs it played:
What Goes on -VU
Human Beings - New York Dolls
Blank Generation - Richard Hell and the Voidoids
Pass The Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind - Yo La Tengo
Street Hassle - Lou Reed
Last.fm wins also in my opinion... also because it feels kind of free, whereas the others always feel so controlled, surveilled.
itunes is lagging behind on many points... it's not a software that looks into the future, if it ever did. But you cannot really compare it here, the function on itunes merely lists some streaming web radios, which of course are a completely different concept from radios like last.fm or pandora.
last.fm is really my pick. You can share your music with friends and it's my choice for online music streaming service. ;)
Hi Richard,
Great list. I've tried a lot of these services, and sometimes they go on inspired streaks, and sometimes they've got the taste of a teeny boppy girl. Perhaps it knows some deep secrets of my personality that I'm not even aware of, but in general, I think music recs will always be an individual by individual thing, and anything bordering on accuracy will also border on A.I.
I think it's a bit funny that we associate "streaming" music with recommendation services. I have a hunch that "streaming music" will be the dominant music consumption mode in the "ad-rev share" era. It's still a work in progress, but I write about it here, in my brand spankin new wordpress blog:
http://freshbreakfast.com/archives/5
Check it out if you have 20 minutes to kill (I know, I could use an intensive course on "conciseness", HA!)
my choice 'radio dumdum'. purely due to the language....really good one in quality & content.
well... imeem should also be in the list if the title of the post is TOP 10. anyways, I love imeem, too! It's a pretty justifiable list and I agree that last.fm is on the top spot.
Useful information. But to listen to Pandora outside of the USA just put any old US postcode into the system and it will accept you
Good, I like listening to the music while sleep
First, a question... Why do you suppose last.fm is not subject to the same licensing constraints as Pandora?
Second, a comment...
I use Pandora, iTunes and last.fm at different times and for different reasons. Your post is not an apples-to-apples comparison, and I think that's important. For pure streaming, Pandora wins hands down for me.
Pandora might not do as good a job as last.fm when you seed it with just one band, but it's easy to make Pandora much smarter. You can seed it with any number of bands or individual songs, to create a very nuanced stream (or "station" to use Pandora's term). You can also rate each song with a thumb up or down, and Pandora continually refines your station based on this feedback.
Here are the first 5 songs on Yahoo! Music LAUNCHcast's Velvet Underground Fan Radio Station. This is based on which songs fans of Velvet Underground rate highly:
1) Tne Velvet Underground - Cool It Down
2) Television - Marquee Moon
3) Iggy & The Stooges - Gimme Danger
4) Mission Of Burma - That's When I Reach For My Revolver
5) Yo La Tengo - Green Arrow
What would you rate those?