I have and am paying for both rhapsody and pandora. I tend to use rhapsody more but that's because at a practical level I'm more generally looking for a 'vaguely sounds like x as background music' (which the rhapsody artist channel provides) rather than a more interesting but also more intense 'I wonder what other artists would be connected to this one.'
I believe at the root there are two very different inference models behind them: pandora's correlates musical components (some 70 specifically defined ones they claim); rhapsody correlates market selection(somewhat like amazon's people who like x also like y) as well as their database of influenced by, contemporary, influenced. In a fair amount of use I'd say that pandora comes up with more interesting connections but that once it has come up with a 'connection' it continues to play the same set of songs to demonstrate that connection. And that the 'connections' in rhapsody are more obvious but that it will play more songs from each connection. A completely unfounded guess is that Pandora will end up licensing or selling it's backend to some other service, since it's uniqueness is not it's marketing or customers but its algorithm and database of musical attriubutes. -- cshaida ------------------------------------------------------------------------ cshaida's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1981 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=44652 _______________________________________________ squeezenetwork mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/squeezenetwork
