The ultimate music recommendation letdown

You know, I consider myself to be a pretty nice person. I try not to dis anyone...well, except maybe the iPod (of course, that's a thing and not a person). But seriously. Who could make a SXSW panel with the title The Ultimate Music Recommendation Smackdown boring? I'll tell you who: representatives from Pandora, Last.fm, iLike, and MusicIP. Don't get me wrong. I'm sure these guys are perfectly nice--even cool--people, but sheesh. Actually, I should really blame the person who wrote the description for the panel. Allow me to paste that description here:

"With the unprecedented accessibility of recorded music, how can we discover that hot new band when there are millions of possibilities at our fingertips? Fortunately, many companies address this very question. Find out which service creates playlists worthy of a veteran DJ, and which service recommends tracks like an iPod set on shuffle as they battle it out in the ultimate playlist smackdown. Based on audience feedback, trophies will be awarded."

Er, is it just me, or does that sound like a panel where you might actually hear some music? Perhaps a battle of playlists from the aforementioned services? With audience cheering to ascertain which one is the best? No? OK, just me then. Anyway, I have rarely been so sorely disappointed by something so anticipated. I heard not a single note of music the entire hour. For the most part, it wasn't even much of a debate (as the moderator put it, "the term 'smackdown' is a bit misleading...they might as well be singing 'Kumbaya'"), although some mild bickering did emerge in the end. In any case, the information relayed was nothing you couldn't find out from the respective PR reps or the Web sites themselves. Certainly informative, but nothing new or outstanding.

[buchananmb]

slacker shoulda been there

jasmine, was this a panel at SXSW? curious to hear what the various reps said. I like all those sites, but have been on slacker.com all morning and prefer it to them all. funny timing for the panel when a new contender launches that day. maybe that's the smackdown. :)

[Jasmineflower]

Totally...

...agree with that Slacker comment--that was the smackdown! :) But, yes, the panel was at SXSW...they didn't have anything particularly interesting to say--just kind of talked about the differences between the services and the way they recommend music. And they didn't even mention Slacker, which is a little surprising, considering the topic of the panel.

[millejos]

SXSW? MyStrands was there:

Yeah, I'm not so sure about slacker, a lot of hype... by the by, if this was at SXSW mystrands was there too:

http://www.mystrands.com/sxsw