as reported here a few days ago, Last.fm hast now started to integrate video-content with their service. nothing groundbreaking like personalized video-channels for now though, but nifty quality clips for selected artists (check The Knife for some examples).
instead of the much anticipated video-upgrade, we just have received a very cool Last.fm flash-widget, which is embedding personalized radio-streams (”recently played”…), playlists & charts to any given website. check the sidebar of this page, press the “play”-button & start grooving (click here if you’re reading this post in your RSS-reader!) …stunning!
(more on TechCrunch)
nothing about this on the official Last.fm-page yet (their blog is kind of hard to find), but Read/Write Web and Mashable both report that the music recommendation service & social network based on the Audioscrobbler technology is about to add video-support within this week! unlike YouTube, which is host to millions of low-res music-clips without legal authorization, Last.fm will probably leverage it’s existing relationships with music-labels to offer a legally solid portfolio of video-content, just like they do with audio today. R/WW:
Initially it will be mainly independent labels featured on the video Last.fm - such as Ninja Tune, Nettwerk Music Group, Domino, Warp, Atlantic and Mute. However among the rosters of those independents are brand name artists like the Arctic Monkeys, Moby and Aphex Twin. Last.fm has also made partnerships with big labels like EMI and Warner, along with “over 20,000 independent labels
moreover, Last.fm will offer superior audio-quality (128kbit/s) over YouTube’s poor 64Kbit/s, less than radio-quality encoding. while probably not part of the initial release, I bet a personalized video-channel based on already existing preference-profiles is only a matter of time - you may call it “MTV 2.0″, like R/WW’s Richard MacManus legitimately did.
update: if you can’t wait for Last.fm’s video-feature, I suggest trying out Last.tv in the meantime: the work of two dutch students, this very cool site mashes up your Last.fm profile with YouTube!
leading music-recommendation service Pandora introduced some community-related features earlier this week (check their official blog for the full scope). however, listener-profiles (including listings of tracks which received most thumbs-ups & -downs) and a very basic search for listeners, artists & stations can’t really keep up with advanced community-features offered by last.fm. f.e., Pandora lacks last.fm’s ‘Musical Neighbours’, a feature that connects listeners by their shared tastes. on the upside, the new user-profiles allow to instantly playback bookmarked tracks on-demand. for now, I suggest to use PandoraFM, a mashup combining the best of both of products by submitting Pandora-playlists into Last.fm’s listener-history.
ps: if you’re interested in music-theory and the categorization Pandora is based on, you might want to check out the Pandora Podcast, featuring Kevin Seal, who works as a musical analyst at Pandora.
if you’re into music-recommendation & -exploration services, you might wanna check out Musicovery. set your preferred mood (energetic, dark, positive, calm), period (80ies, 90ies etc.) and musical genres, and Musicovery will generate a matching - though static - playlist. while this is definitely inferior to Pandora’s dynamically adjusting streams, Musicovery offers a beautiful flash-based visual chart to freely navigate the tracklist (something Pandora’s free-service offers only under restrictions due to licensing). imagine a similar interface to Pandora’s musical genome database, visualizing all sorts of musical connections & dependencies…I’ld gladly pay a monthly fee for that! 
(btw, Musicovery charges EUR 2,-/month for its high-bitrate streams, LoFi is free)
