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

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.

Spotify

So Spotify finally launched in the United States after much anticipated wait. This is something a lot of us have been waiting for because the issues here in the US regarding streaming music is a mess. We have a few options, such as Pandora, Last.fm, Slacker and so forth for our free, streaming options. But it’s time to graduate from being cheap and get real with our streaming music options. Gone are the days of having to pay $0.99 for that one song that I want out of a whole album which really detours me from even buying music. The fact that music has gotten so bad is my excuse of why I refuse to hand over any money to most of these artists these days.

But why has it taken this long? Why did’t we have Spotify five or six years ago? Well we did. I used to be a huge fan of Yahoo! Music which had a decent collection of music for about $7/month. But the catalog wasn’t as big. We also had options with Napster and Rhapsody.

Honestly, I think people just haven’t been ready to understand the concept that the RIAA does not want anyone to own their music anymore. No one wanted to pay a month premium for music they don’t own physically or can’t touch. That’s always been the old mentality. People wanted to to be able to own that CD so they could rip it to their hardrive, make copies, whatever. It was theirs.

With the explosion of mobile, we can now still have our music when we want, how we want these days. If I want to listen to music on my computer at work, I just login to the app. At the gym? Just fire up the iPhone app. At home? You can purchase many of the speaker systems like Sonors that have these services integrated.

Now we’re at this state in the music industry where for a small premium we can have all our music when we want, how we want and where we want it’s here to stay and you can kiss your old music collection goodbye.

Turntables in Your Browser

The guy who wrote the original audio library that other sites such as Soundcloud and so forth use for web based audio came up with a really awesome concept of turntables in the browser. Uses HTML5 as well, nifty!