The Online Radio Dilemma

So, everyone's talkin' about Pandora. Pandora this, Pandora that. Whatever. It's no different than Last.fm, really, but it acts all fancy because of the whole "Music Genome Project" thing. I'm checking it out, I'm giving it a chance (as we speak, as a matter of fact...I created a Frank Zappa station, and I'm just waiting for the moment where it plays something that sucks. I created a Beatles station first, and the first non-Beatles thing it tried to play was f%@king "Brown Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison. As if I haven't heard that song on oldies/lite rock/classic rock radio a billion times, or had to sit through every crappy cover band on earth play that song. You're treading on thin ice, Pandora...). Last.fm has the advantage, because indie artists get to be part of it. You can upload your music and add it to the Last.fm database, and people who like a particular artist that you resemble might get to hear your song and not something they already know about. Pandora, so far as I can tell, has no option for introducing new music to the system.

Plus, I like the little Last.fm scrobbler box that registers every single song I listen to on my iTunes. And every time I plug my iPod into the computer, it scrobbles everything I played on my iPod since the last time I plugged it in. Hell yeah! It's a complete record of everything I listened to. Pandora has no such features.

If you create a profile on Mog.com, it will also keep track of what you listen to, and the last 10 songs you listened to on iTunes will be listed on your Mog profile. The Mog-0-matic software will also tally everything you have in your iTunes and tell you who you have the most songs by, etc.

Pandora is a lot of fuss over nothing, really. Last.fm does everything it does and more. Music Genome Project? Whatever. If you're not going to give it up to the indie artists, you can put your Music Genome up your wazoo.