Is Rdio the American Spotify...or not?

http://www.rdio.com/

Since details on the site are still minimal w/o a membership, Wired took a look: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/06/kazaa-skype-founders-launch-twitter-like-music-service-rdio/

Janus Friis with Niklas Zennström, who disrupted music distribution with the Kazaa file sharing service and phone companies with Skype, unveiled their Twitter-like version of a digital music service at the crack of midnight Thursday morning.

Rdio offers instant access to more than 5 million tracks from all the major labels and several indies to listeners in the United States and Canada through a web browser, downloadable software or mobile app. It’s available for free for three days and then for fees of $5 (web only) or $10 (web plus mobile).

The service enters a crowded field; Napster, Rhapsody, MOG, mSpot and others already charge similar prices to deliver the same music in the same ways in the United States. And Apple, Google and Spotify are waiting in the wings.

Along with leveraging experience from Kazaa and Skype (as well as their failed video service Joost), founders Friis and Zennström hope Rdio will distinguish itself from the field with features borrowed from Twitter and Facebook. It’ll let you see what people you trust are listening to, what they like and who they know, through real-time feeds, activity streams and profile pages that display the most-played music by a given user graphically with different-sized bubbles.

“It is an intrinsically social service, kind of like Twitter meets music,” said Rdio COO Carter Adamson, formerly general manager of Skype’s desktop division. “And just as on Twitter, you’re not only following your friends [but] people you respect for news, humor or whatever it is, here, you’re following people who you respect for their taste in music.”

Rdio surfaces listening data in other ways too, for instance showing which Rdio listener has played a song more times than anyone else — a concept familiar to anyone with the privilege of counting a Foursquare mayor among their acquaintances.

So far, no privacy layers exist on the site, so listening activity is there for all to see. Adamson and Rdio CEO Drew Larner said those would be added soon, albeit carefully. Too much privacy too soon would stunt the service’s crucial social aspects.

Rdio's desktop software couldn't import much of my iTunes library into my Rdio account, but it's a start, and I can add more music through the web or mobile apps. In return for not uploading the actual files (which can take days or weeks), the Kazaa founders need not worry about accusations of piracy.

All cloud-based music services, Rdio included, were dealt a heavy blow by AT&T’s decision to stop selling unlimited data connections for iPads and smartphones — users won’t be able to stream in a mobile setting (see: driving) to their hearts’ content.

The Rdio team offers the same answer with which other services have responded: a caching feature that stores as much music as you want on your mobile device. You can decide which songs and playlists should get stored there using the computer-based version of the service or the device itself, and music transfers over Wi-Fi.

The company also hopes to lure customers into subscribing with a persistent music player that follows you around the website, optional Adobe Air software download (for loading your iTunes collection into your Rdio account or buying song downloads to keep after your subscription ends), and mobile apps for Blackberry and iPhone, with an Android app on the way.

It’s a true multiplatform service, in that if you move from the website to the phone, or from a FireFox browser window to a Chrome browser window, the same song remains cued up to exactly the point in the song where you left off. And everywhere you look, feature bloat has been kept to a minimum.

“With Skype, we were in a very crowded market, just like music,” said Adamson. “And what we found, in the end — it wasn’t about all the various features, and lord knows we piled on a lot, at a certain point — that the users wanted. They wanted the cleanest, simplest experience, and in the end, that’s what got us ahead of everyone else, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do here…. The community aspect is the other big lesson that we learned [from Skype] — viral growth within networks and communities. We are bringing music alive through people.”

After a lengthy private beta period, Rdio is now available, assuming you can get an existing user to send you an invite (much like the way in which Google originally spread Gmail). That approach should help the service spread among friends and pockets of like-minded music fans, encouraging the social network tendencies that differentiate Rdio from the field.

Once you score an invite, the service is free to use for three days, after which you must enter a credit card number for another 10 free days before the fees start kicking in, unless you cancel.

And therein lies the rub.

So far, music fans have been largely unwilling to plunk down $60 to $120 a year for music subscriptions. Maybe if all their friends are doing it, the idea will start to take hold on a larger scale. But even then, Rdio’s could be a slow climb and the summit might not offer a positive outlook. The company joins a growing number of others vying for the 0.4 percent or so of the U.S. population (1.2 million in 2009, down from 1.6 million in 2008 according to the RIAA [.pdf]) that’s willing to pay for a music subscription.

Such subscriptions accounted for under 3 percent of the U.S. music market last year, which itself declined more than 12 percent from 2008. No matter how you slice it, those are slim pickings.

free for -three days-? horrific web 1.5 name? "features borrowed from twitter and facebook"? i'm gonna go out on a limb and say no.

My thing is I don't know why anyone would buy a subscription until they build up a huge database of songs you can listen to on demand. I realize they have to make money early on to keep going, but it's a snake eating its tail. People won't subscribe unless there's a giant database, but Rdio can't acquire a giant database without first proving that a revenue stream will be present (and growing).

Spotify is kind of a miracle anomaly, and will probably never be fully replicated.

i have invites if anyone wants to try it out....7 hours of funhouse anyone?

I keep reading this damn thing as 'Is Ride the American Spotify'

So, with the crappy update to Spotify, people are considering jumping ship and moving on to Rdio.

I just joined Spotify, but can see what others are saying and agree.

Any Rdio enthusiasts here on ILX?

I use both Spotify and Rdio (and have a professional interest in both, as both are customers of my employer). Either one is easily worth $20/month, so I have no problem paying $10/each for both. I think it's pretty uncontroversial to note that Spotify still has a slight advantage in catalog, and that Rdio's UI is more elegant. For me, personally, the UI is the more interesting factor, because even though there seem to be slightly more tracks that are on Spotify but not Rdio (although there are some the other way, too), there are enough things on neither service that you should still expect to do some out-of-service music acquisition whatever you pick.

i like this more than spotify i think

I am very pro rdio. what they are missing compared to spotify is pretty negligible and it just runs sooooo much smoother for me. on all platforms. plus it looks a hell of a lot better. search function is better as well (allows searching by label for instance).

i like that i can control it from anywhere

Bought by Pandora, being wound down, likely.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151116006169/en/Pandora-Acquire-Key-Assets-Rdio

I've got a few friends who are Rdio loyalists and they're really bummed about this (but they only started talking about it today, so the news came to me late).

not, then