Sid Vicious was not known for his musical abilities. His very short career with the Sex Pistols was not marked with any significant achievement at all. There is, however, this one hilarious thing he did…

The way I see it, there are only two targeted internet radio tools. Pandora, and last.fm. Now that I’ve had the chance to listen to “radio” on both services for countless hours, I believe that I have a pretty good feel for the pro’s and con’s of the two services.

First, for full transparency, I’ll just start by saying that last.fm is, at the bottom line, the clear choice for me. I use this service almost exclusively for music at work.

Here is a quick rundown of the “features” of the two services.

Pandora “features”:

• Plays music based on a single input (an artist, song, genre, etc.).
• Changes the style of music based on your input, i.e. you can tell your player, “yes that’s the sweetness”, or, “no that’s the awful” and the player adjusts the “gene pool” accordingly.
• Has a commercially financed team of musicians and technicians profiling individual songs to ensure that the “genes” in the music are properly identified.
• Radio stations are blogged automatically on facebook.
• Runs inside your browser or in various clients.
• Has radio streams for genres, artists, songs.
• Radio streams can evolve over time.
• Free
• Funded by ads, venture capital.

Last.fm “features”:

• Plays music based on several peices of input (several artists must be added to your “library” before your radio station is created).
• Allows the ban-hammer to eliminate the song from future playback queues.
• Songs can be “loved.” Loved songs are blogged on facebook.
• Loved sons are added to a single playlist of only loved music.
• Songs are categorized by the last.fm community via tagging.
• Can run inside your browser, or in the free last.fm client.
• Integrates with iTunes.
• “scrobbling”, which is basically last.fm speak for putting into your recently played queue (which is visible on your facebook profile, and at the last.fm website, and adds the song to your last.fm “library”).
• Automatic “neighborhood” creation. Your neighborhood is made up of people with similar listening habits.
• Has radio streams of loved tracks only, library tracks only, neighborhood tracks, suggested tracks.
• Suggests [semi-]local events (gigs, shows, etc) that you might be interested in.
• free
• Funded by ads, venture capital, user subscriptions (which provide some extra customization and community features, along with network/cpu bandwidth priority).

Both pandora and last.fm have everything I’d ever want from internet radio. I like the fact that both integrate into facebook. Last.fm has a publicly available API, which means that there are more community created goodies, but Pandora has a decent list of extras (like the facebook app). In fact, I’d say that for the first few hours of playing Pandora or Last.fm, I don’t think I could see any difference between the two radios.

However, as time goes on, it becomes very clear that last.fm is just smarter, better, faster… and stronger. The first thing that started to bother me in Pandora was the duplicate playback. I start feeling like I’ve tuned into a top 40 station after a few hours, while the same songs play over and over again. While it is certainly impressive to see the accuracy of their “genome project”, it doesn’t really count when the same song is played over and over again. Last.fm plays throughout my entire work day without playing a single song twice. Then, I learned about last.fm’s iTunes integration. After the last.fm client added every song in my iTunes library to my last.fm library, I was able to play the equivalent of the “party shuffle” in iTunes on any computer in the world, even if I’m 1000 miles away from my iTunes library. Then there’s the facebook app. Pandora tells your facebook pals every single station you listen to and when you start listening to it. Last.fm is a little bit less intrusive, just showing the songs you “loved.” Then I found that I can add an app to my wordpress blog (look to the sidebar), which shows the last 6 album covers from the songs that I last listened to. The list just goes on and on…. community tagging, “neighbors” of similar last.fm users, reccomendations based on your past “scrobbels”… Oh yeah… what I almost forgot, but what could very well be the biggest showstopper of all: Pandora radio shuts down after a certain period of inactivity. I’ll grab my 7th cup of coffee for the morning, come back to my tune-deprived desk, and ten minutes later I start wondering where the tunes went. That was ten minutes where I could’ve been discovering a new band or listening to that song that makes my blood flow, making the morning just that more productive.

Pandora is a great tool that could learn a few things from community supported Last.fm.