Pandora vs. Slacker - Internet Radio throwdown

[Optimystik]

Background:

In my job, I have to sit at my computer for very long stretches of time. So a good internet radio station is vital to my sanity efficiency.

As a result, I consider myself something of an internet radio connoisseur - having sampled such gourmet fare as di.fm, Last.fm and Rhapsody -

For the longest time, I was a Pandora fanatic - having graduated from (vomit) Yahoo! Launchcast, the sheer novelty of a radio station that actually knew what I liked to hear made me giddy. And their sleek and friendly, Web 2.0 interface was a huge draw.

But then I got a Blackberry, and with it, Slacker... and I was impressed beyond words. First, I heard several new songs - Lady Gaga's Bad Romance and 50 Cent's Baby By Me remix, among others - a whole week before they first debuted on regular radio. The sound quality was top notch. And it's not just music - unlike Pandora, Slacker has comedy stations, both clean and dirty! But, the verbal ads bugged me... so I decided to try Slacker Plus.

The clincher of my decision? True unlimited skipping. For those of you with Pandora One (i.e. the paid version) you know that the only restriction they remove is your skips/day - you're still limited to 6 skips/hour, with the cooldown starting after your first one. That's right, you're paying to listen to the radio... and you're still constrained in what you can listen to. To quote Damon Wayans - "Homey don't play that."

Well, that cinched it for me. Currently I am subscribed to both, but likely won't renew my Pandora subscription, sticking with the free service.


tl;dr: Which one do you guys like better, and why? Is one better than the other at your desk? In the car? While working out? Through your cellphone? At parties?

Or is there a third-party radio station you prefer to both of them? I'm always on the lookout for more.

(P.S.: Pandora won the Googlefight. (http://googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=slacker+radio&word2=pandora+radio))

[mallorean_thug]

Hmm, well I tried last.fm and rhapsody before settling into Pandora, but I've never tried Slacker.

What else makes you prefer it besides the availability through a mobile device, the comedy stations, and the unlimited skips? (while those are all great reasons, none of them are deal breakers for me as I'm only using the free version of Pandora through my laptop and want it for music, not comedians) How does its music recommendation stack up.

I guess that I should try it out but after spending much of the last year fine tuning my Pandora stations, it would be a bit of a stretch to switch over. And I've never had problems with hearing new music, mostly through a judicious use of the "Don't play for a month" button.

The one thing that did get me to start playing Pandora all the time though was when I found OpenPandora, a third party program that makes pandora a stand alone program that sits in my task bar. No more sorting through tabs to find it, but since it keeps the same slim interface, no memory hogging akin to iTunes going on either.

[Optimystik]

For me, the music choice is just as good if not better on Slacker. And it's free too, I just thought comparing the paid versions would be

In time, I firmly believe Pandora will eclipse all other radio offerings - the Music Genome Project is miles ahead of any other genre system out there - but the problem with their approach is that it leads to extremely small musical selection compared to the others. When uploading just one song takes them half an hour's worth of scrutiny by a trained musicologist, compared to merely tagging it and moving on, it forms a nigh inescapable bottleneck as they struggle to take care of new offerings while simultaneously archiving and reassigning the old.

As quantity of music is my biggest draw - I dislike hearing repeats, and love discovering new music - Pandora misses the mark there.

To be honest, I'm unfamiliar with Slacker's system. Last.fm uses tags, to great effect. Sorting songs by tags is a form of Wiki Magic; let your listeners decide what genre a song is, they probably know what constitutes "metal" better than you do, for instance... but I think that perhaps a couple of them slip through the cracks.

I don't want it to seem like I'm bashing Pandora though - like I said, I believe it has great potential - so here are a couple of its advantages:


- Because of its "attributes" system, Pandora can more easily distinguish a normal song from its remix. Generally, if a song has four-on-the-floor beats and is over a certain BPM, it must be the dance mix version. Slacker suffers from a weakness shared by other internet radio programs, in that it sees the artist and title and assigns the song based on that, without paying attention to the version.

- With Pandora, it's easier to move or copy songs between stations. ("Copying" is a trick I learned - when you move a song to another station it automatically "thumbs downs" it on the origin station - so just thumb it back up and bam, it's now approved on both stations.) With Slacker, you have to search for the song on the station you really want it on, though that doesn't take long.

- The ads are visual rather than verbal (at least, they were - I think they have verbal ads on Pandora now, but I forget since I'm a PO subscriber), so less interruption of your listening experience.

[JonestheSpy]

I've never used Slacker. I like Pandora a lot, but you're right that the small selection of songs by any particular artist is a big drawback.

If listening to the internets, I either do Pandora or an actual radio station - usually noncommercial cllege or public stations, though KPIG out of Salinas rocks my world, too.

[Rutskarn]

I'm a philistine. I listen to the same narrowly-defined station on Pandora every single time, the same mix of 20 or so songs. That's how I operate: listen to the same few songs until I actually vomit upon hearing them, then switch playlists.

[ninjalemur]

Slacker. Has better selection and range.