Deezer.com

Pros

• Fairly large library to choose from.
• Making playlists is easy.
• Music player is on every page, either fea­tur­ing music, or dis­play­ing yours.
• Adding Songs to a play list is all inline, and doesn’t require any sort of popup or extended form. Search, Add, Select pro­file, OK. That’s all
• Built in pro­file, pref­er­ences, user base, mes­sag­ing, other web 2.0 stuffs.
• Avail­able in a snot-​load of lan­guages (with a few spelling hiccups)
• Player is some­what robust, sport­ing repeat, shuf­fle, pause and pre­view options.
• Abil­ity to upload your own MP3s, which are stored pri­vately for you only. Part of this scares me, as cool as an idea that it is.

Cons

• Some of the worst UI deci­sions I’ve ever seen, some very unin­tu­itive locations.
• Some rather funny spelling mistakes
• Every­thing is in flash.
• Some of the most annoy­ing ads that actu­ally break the page and stop it from load­ing until you close it. Go to hell milk ads.
• Com­mu­nity aspect sorta sucks, as there’s no real way to get people inter­act­ing. All users must be found via search, which makes it hard to get par­tic­i­pa­tion up.
• Weird lack of rather common songs.
• I’ve manged to totally bugger up their player by click­ing to fast.

last.fm

Pros

• Clean, simple interface
• Down­load­able pro­gram to stream music from pro­gram instead of browser. Pro­gram also relays what you play in pro­grams such as iTunes, and saves your tastes.
• Wide and diverse musi­cal library
• Great user inter­ac­tion. Friend lis­ten­ing lists etc. Good com­mu­nity aspect.
• swap­pable theme (stupid, point­less, and sweet)
• Exclud­ing the music player, every­thing is HTML (not Flash)
• The player will slowly intro­duce new music/bands/artists that are sim­i­lar to your choices, allow­ing you to be exposed to more artists.

Cons

• Dis­tinct lack of common songs
• The pro­gram doesn’t allow for the pick­ing if indi­vid­ual songs, nor does the browser player
• Adding songs to your library feels like a chore, and has a few too many clicks.
• Cre­at­ing playlists is way more buried than I would have expected.
• Their new layout feels a little TOO min­i­mal to me, and I feel a little lost when trying to get around. The drop­down list beside your name is not what I would expect for navigation.
• Player doesn’t have a pause. What the hell.

Which would I choose?

It actu­ally depends.

If I’m in the mood for a type of music, then last.fm wins hands down. If I want spe­cific songs, then Deezer is actu­aly more of a playlist-​oriented system. Last.fm has a much stronger com­mu­nity function-​base, which is great if you’re look­ing to con­nect with other people over music. Deezer, though it fea­tures com­mu­nity fetau­res, it’s not nearly as stong as last.fm. It’s playlist pick and choose style is fan­tas­tic if you want to simply listen to your favorites (if they’re there). Deezer allows you to store your MP3 onlines, making it’s playlist fea­tures that much stronger.

Moods, friends, fac­toids: last.fm

Songs, playlists, stor­age: Deezer