This  Wired article:  Fine Tune Your Music Discoveries  is a quick review of 4 popular music discovery sites: Pandora, Last.Fm. iLike and QLoud.  The author gets it a bit wrong when he says that all of these sites use collaborative filtering to recommend music - Pandora relies on content-based matching of content, not collaborative filtering.  Interestingly enough, the author liked the Pandora recommendations best. The author does point out the problem that collaborative systems have with popularity bias: Oddly, I found the more mainstream an artist is, the less precise your results are likely to be. The recommended artists similar to Neutral Milk Hotel, which is arguably the most left-field pick of the three, were almost universally more accurate across all four services.  I do agree with the article that the QLoud's Ajax-heavy site is a bit of a turn off. 

Comments:

Hi, i'm the co-founder of Qloud and appreciate yours (and Wired's comments). We've been working hard on an entire site redesign which should be released next monday or tuesday which addresses some of the problems users have had with the arrangement of the site and the javascript. As always, we appreciate any comments (good or bad) about our site and its functionality. You and your readers can email me directly or to feedback at qloud with any comments you might have.

Posted by Mike Lewis on November 29, 2006 at 02:18 PM EST #

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