I’m Loving Rdio

A while back when Spotify was coming to the US, I started getting excited. Finally a subscription based music service people were paying attention to. With it’s simplistic design, and vast array of music it was an obvious choice for me who did not like buying music that I was only interested in hearing a few times until it faded into memory. DOn’t get me wrong, I love the classics and supporting the artists who make great music but for most of the music I listen to now days, it’s one off stuff or something I have to buy from ten different sources. After I used Spotify for a while I ran into a couple issues that I still deal with.

Discovery

Discovering music with Spotify still feels extremely difficult. If I know what I’m looking for, sure it’s straight forward to find what I want. But after that I consistently hit a wall. Where to go from here? What new music should I be listening to because of my musical interests? Spotify’s mobile app does not address these concerns well. I tended to just play the same music over and over because for me to sit and think about what I wanted to listen to got tiring.

iPad

I love my iPad, especially the new retina display model. So where is Spotify’s iPad app? It’s still nowhere to be found. According to CrunchBase they’ve raised $189M but still do not have a decent iPad app. What a shame, as I tend to listen to a lot of music on my iPad at home.

Introducing, Rdio

Rdio is not a new company on the block. They’ve actually been around for a while providing almost the same type of experience as Spotify. Some of the features they have are:

  • Great discovery and recommendations engine
  • Social features
  • iPad, iPhone, and HTML 5 based web interfaces
  • Family accounts
  • Offline song syncing
  • Collection feature, which makes finding everything you’re interested in easy

I could go on, but you get the point. Plus, these guys are located in San Francisco. Awesome. I think their platform is really great, they offer a lot of selection in upwards of 15M+ I believe and just beats the pants off Spotify in my opinion.