Simply Red - Holding Back The Years

?Pandora. Purely sonic-based as determined by team of human experts classifying every song into features. Not scalable. One-trick pony only able to determine that one song sounds like another song, not anything about user preference or other personalized recommendations.
?iLike. Purely algorithm-based utilizing only data from other iLike members. Service is meant to be embedded in a widget, not a full-fledged recommendation platform across an entire music service.
?Last.fm.Purely algorithm-based utilizing only data from other members and their scrobbles.
?AmazonMP3.Utilizes the Amazon recommendation platform which is based mainly on collaborative filtering. We assume they use some human tweaking, but they?ve never publicly stated this fact. The AmazonMP3 and audio books recommendations are crippled because they are based on regular Amazon recommendations which are very focused on closely related items (i.e. Bob Dylan?s _Blood on the Tracks_ returns Bob Dylan?s _Blonde on Blonde_. duh!)
?iTunes Genius.Sub-standard, algorithm only - developed in-house. Only uses iTunes data. Steve Jobs has creepy man crush on John Mayer and Jack Johnson.
?MySpace Music.Crazy flashing yellow buttons that randomly start playing Buffalo Springfield songs when you visit your friend?s page.
His critiques are more or less valid, but I?m not convinced he?s come up with anything better. With very limited testing, I found the recommendations to be hit or miss. I will reserve judgment until I play with it some more. If it is an improvement from before, then at least that?s progress.
But my big beef with eMusic is twofold: it offers an incomplete catalog