I was a rdio subscriber and their Andriod app was unreliable - it would just stop working and have to be force killed. Yes, I can do that but for most people, that is pretty horribl. Even I switched to Spotify after a while.
Just as a alternative view: I was a Spotify user but their Android app was unreliable... my phone would hard reset occasionally. Then I started using Google Play Music.
I've had the same issues - with some updates it gets better or worse, it's pretty annoying. Another thing that concerns me with the app is that the setting to only download/stream tracks on wifi doesn't seem to be honored; if I have autoplay on in my car, it will start streaming songs I've never downloaded over 4G.
Apart from that, I love the service, and I'm sad to see it go!
I love how easy it is to browse for music by record label on rdio. Not something you can do on other platforms and it's a great way to discover new music! It'll be sad to see it go.
Does not hurt, but I think most people don't really care or remember the record label.
For me the killer feature would be a sophisticated implementation of "if you like this song, here are some you may also like". Sophisticated, because the music I like is usually an amalgam of multiple styles, for example jazz-funk-soul. The existing software is way too simplistic right now:
1.it usually classifies music in exclusive styles (soul or jazz, but not both),
2. the recommendations that come up are usually the well known artists, and I am more interested in less known ones (because I am familiar with all the big names already).
Those two problems are exactly what the curation of a record label provides. If I really like a song or album by Hudson Mohawke or Flying Lotus, then I know I can find similar releases from the Warp or Brainfeeder labels. This lets me explore similar artists that may not be as well known. I have experienced very high rates of success with this method, much better than any algorithmic recommendations.
The difference is, Spotify has a HUGE brand. When Spotify launched it was like iTunes, but you could listen to everything "for free". Sure, it wasn't free but compared to paying for every Album i'd listen to, a flat rate is basically free.
Spotify has a great brand, but that doesn't solve the underlying poor economics of their model. With Apple and Google moving in, I'm not sure their brand is a long term advantage at this point. I just started trialing Youtube Music - $9.99 a month (US only at the moment) with free Google Play Music. And it's pretty good. And I'm pretty sure Youtube is a bigger brand than Spotify.
Neither Google or Apple has to make money from their service - whereas Spotify must make money. It makes me wonder why Spotify hasn't just gone after artists directly, because that's the only way I see them making money long term.
Spotify may be somewhat insulated, since the major labels now have a large ownership stake in it. OTOH, I suspect Spotify will jack its prices up over time as the labels tighten the screws.
It's not like labels pushed one another with sharp elbows in order to get into that financing round. Spotify needed licenses, they had very little cash, they did not have statutory rates like Pandora, so giving up equity upfront with a promise of later payments was the reasonable terms they've arrived at.
"Rdio, I guess, made the mistake of trying to be sustainable too early," Miner says. "That classic startup mistake of worrying about being profitable and having a business that makes any sense before you’ve reached this astronomical growth curve."
A. Mistake of having a business that makes sense? Are you kidding me?
B. Spotify and Pandora are heading straight towards the same fate as Rdio.
This is unlikely, since the major labels now have a sizable ownership stake in Spotify. I foresee Spotify slowly jacking up prices as the labels demand it.
I've always wondered why Google and Apple didn't do just that.
They offer some of the biggest distribution channels available, have deep pockets, and have a VERY vested interest in killing the status quo because of the freedom it will give them for using music and promoting artists in new ways.
That is definitely one industry that needs to have more competition.
The book "How Music Got Free" explores that dynamics. Steve Jobs had an idea for Apple Music to launch as a label, doing direct 50/50 split with an artist instead of opaque label contracts.
He'd call Doug Morris (ex-Universal, ex-Warner, ex-Sony) to get him to come onboard as a CEO of that label, but in Morris' view a label that could not cut upfront checks to young artists would not stay in business for long.
Any promising artists would then be schmoozed and seduced by the labels who can cut advance checks and offer real money in the pocket today instead of abstract fairer revenue split down the road. Any existing top artists already have some label relationship that is hard to get out of. What you're left with is a bunch of nobodies, kinda like the MP3.com back in the days.
I might be missing something here, but Apple clearly can bankroll paying artists up front. Any insight into what drove the strategic decision not to (at least in the short term)?
From the book it sounds like they didn't want to. That implies running a whole shebang with scouts, sleazy agents, legal departments that draw up screwy contracts to guarantee future revenues, i.e., everything but the transparency that Apple wanted to bring to market.
The problem is that with low scale and low growth prospects, even a profitable business can end up stagnating. Will everyone (founders, employees, investors) want to stay on?
Especially in this case: the business isn’t in a high-margin niche; it has large direct competitors like Spotify, Apple, Google.
The mistake is in diving into a commodity business where you don't control the only thing your customers care about. It's like artisanal gas stations or something.
What Spotify has going for it is the social graph -- people trade playlists via Spotify, and if all your playlists and your friend's playlists are in Spotify, it makes it harder to switch because of cost or Taylor Swift. It also has probably the most omnipresent music app (although annoyingly no app for Xbox One).
For someone like me who was using Spotify for a few years, the short experience with Rdio that i had was like "Oh, ok, it's basically like Spotify. I keep using Spotify then."
Alternatively, I used Rdio first and tried out Spotify when they released the Playstation4 integration and my reaction was "Oh, ok, it's basically Rdio but with a lousy interface. I'll keep using Rdio then".
I'm in denial. I refuse to believe this is happening.
When Rdio is gone there's going to be a huge hole in my life that needs filled with good design and experience browsing my music. iTunes is a shitshow. Spotify is ugly. Pandora is radio. It's all rubbish.
Agree on the radio part. I know "curated" stations are the hip new feature on Apple and similar music services but there are tens of thousands of free streaming stations that use the shoutcast/icecast protocol and they've been around since the late 1990's.
The on-demand services are more like a replacement for album/track purchases but I've found that bookmarking 10 or 20 favorite Shoutcast stations in anything from Winamp to VLC to any other desktop or mobile app that supports streaming mp3 is like having the best, human-programmed radio dial ever.
Even back in the early 2000's when I was stuck on 128k/sec cellular data I would hook my Treo up to the car stereo and stream 96kbps music when everyone else was paying for XM. Then with the move to third-gen data networks I got the bump to 800k/sec and streaming much nicer 128k-192k stuff was simple. Sound didn't beat a CD but it was better than satellite radio's compressed streams a lot of the time.
Even today, I usually listen to KEXP's stream or Devil's Night Radio or something from SomaFM before dicking around on Spotify or Youtube. There's just something to be said for finding stations that are programmed and run by people with a knowledge and love of music that you also may enjoy. Noticing themes or trends in strings of songs always puts a smile on my face in a way that Pandora or Spotify just never will.
Look into it, there are many, many other music subscription services other than apple music and spotify. Just off the top of my head: Deezer, Tidal, Rara, Groove.
Definitely look at Google Play Music. Large catalog and you can upload any song they don't already have. Plus you get ad-free YouTube now along with some added YouTube features on mobile
Google Play Music was great until I updated the hard drives and then OS on a few devices. Each thing counts towards the device limit of 10 and you can only delete 4 devices per year.
Just this past week, Google Play Music support has refused to reset my authorizations now that I've reached my 4-per-year limit a second time. This anti-fraud measure makes no sense when they don't track the physical device through some identifier. I've had to reset/restore my iOS device countless times to troubleshoot battery and I tinker with custom ROMs on the many Android devices I've bought in the past year and each time it counts as a separate, different device for some strange, inflexible reason. The fact that it clear shows the last date each "instance" was used should disprove any multiple access "fraud" and even then, the subscription is limited to one stream at a time.
Although I am an "edge case," this really punishes the hobbyist.
I'm at my wit's end. I liked the subscription service but now I've got to cancel and go to Apple Music.
Having to call support and beg once the 4-device limit and explain the rational (OCD and tweaking devices to get them "just right") is just "ugh."
The Apple iTunes PC/Mac 5-devices (de-auth any time from that device an unlimited number of times) with a 1-time yearly self device-reset is more reasonable.
Which platform? I've heard this criticism before but I don't understand it.
I use the service on Android, OS X, Windows, and Ubuntu...and while it may not be 100% beautiful throughout, I think it manages to balance decent aesthetics with decent UX better than most mainstream apps out there.
Well, it's a bit less usable than Rdio. More clicks to find out artist info. OTOH, I was always annoyed that favoriting a track in Rdio required a right-click menu.
What do you mean? Like filenames versus id3 tags/metadata? I thought most media player apps could play songs from within a folder and it was only the more "clever" ones that tried making everything about syncing and playlists.
That's one reason I never really took to iTunes. I just keep my music on my computer (and occasionally on my phone) in folders with the structure Music\Artist\Album\(tracks). Then when I want to play something, I can either sort albums or artists or I can just point it at the folder I want it to read so it only shows what's in that folder (good for folders that I might make with various tracks from multiple albums).
Basically I'm a throwback and I just want everything to be Winamp I think.
Yes, this was what I meant. Sure they can play files from within a folder. In a sense that you browse to that folder somehow, click it and it will be opened by one. But browsing folders from the music app and using/adding that folder for the playlist is rare.
Just switched from Rdio to Apple Music. Love it so far. Nice clean UI, great recommendations, huge catalog, 3 month free trail, nice Android app, backed by a mega-corp with a war chest most countries would envy...it's a solid bet that it will only get better.
I loved the interface design and discovery. There was a lot to like about Rdio, but no gapless playback? C'mon who wants to listen to Darkside of the Moon with a 2 second pause between each track?
Wow that really sucks. I use Rdio daily. It's really good for exploring new music - I've built up a great list of favourites. Is there any way to back that info up locally?
Now I'm looking around to see if it would be possible to import the contents of that CSV into another service. It looks like Spotify has an API to add a track to a user: https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/save-tracks-user/
Most of my friends are (were?) on Rdio. I liked it to a point, until the music library I'd built was suddenly cut in half because reasons? Reasons pertaining to exclusivity arrangements with other services, or label agreements expiring, or whatever. But basically, reasons.
It's enough to turn me off of cloud-based music services entirely, honestly. I'm only considering possibly ever subscribing to Apple Music because they let you upload tracks you own that they don't have. I hear Google Music does the same thing? Or maybe I'll finally set up that Plex server...
So true. I remember the first time I brought up an old-ish Spotify playlist, only to discover that all of the songs were now unplayable, with no explanation. All of the songs still existed on the service, but those IDs just expired for some reason. Same happened on Rdio from time to time. Presumably this is a record company issue, not one endemic to any particular service.
But as much I wanted to love Rdio, the app (Android in particular) had many bugs that would cause it to crash or lock up, and some that would send my network connection off into the weeds, requiring (at least) an airplane-mode reset.
And despite the claims of "elegant, groundbreaking", what music app has Search on slide-out besides Rdio? With results that appear in a 1/3-size screen?
Time to figure out how to get my playlists over to Rhapsody, the Little Music Service That Could.
It's really nice having all the music you like safely stashed away on a local hard drive, no cloud anything, where there's no chance that any future copyright-mafia skullduggery can take it away from you.
As someone who worked at GS, this kills me. I hate to see a streaming service go down like that. I've mostly been listening to my library in Amazon's online player - not a particularly big fan of Prime Music at all, bleh - but I did give Rdio a try and enjoyed it. It was a much more enjoyable experience than Spotify. Definitely feeling for the company.
I can't for the life of me figure out why we need 18 different services that do -- from my perspective -- the exact same thing. Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, Google Music, Amazon, Rdio... can't tell the difference between any of them, so I just use whichever one gives me a free month that month in all the spam marketing crap they send out.
Competition is healthy. With 18 different services to do more or less the exact same thing, prices stay down. If there was only Spotify and they raised their prices to higher than what you prefer, what company would you turn to?
68 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadApart from that, I love the service, and I'm sad to see it go!
For me the killer feature would be a sophisticated implementation of "if you like this song, here are some you may also like". Sophisticated, because the music I like is usually an amalgam of multiple styles, for example jazz-funk-soul. The existing software is way too simplistic right now:
1.it usually classifies music in exclusive styles (soul or jazz, but not both),
2. the recommendations that come up are usually the well known artists, and I am more interested in less known ones (because I am familiar with all the big names already).
Neither Google or Apple has to make money from their service - whereas Spotify must make money. It makes me wonder why Spotify hasn't just gone after artists directly, because that's the only way I see them making money long term.
That's partially what Tidal tried to do but it's not going very well for them either, unfortunately.
A. Mistake of having a business that makes sense? Are you kidding me?
B. Spotify and Pandora are heading straight towards the same fate as Rdio.
Netflix is on fire right now with their original series.
Spotify producing some hit records could change the equation. They already have some great content in the Spotify Sessions series.
They offer some of the biggest distribution channels available, have deep pockets, and have a VERY vested interest in killing the status quo because of the freedom it will give them for using music and promoting artists in new ways.
That is definitely one industry that needs to have more competition.
He'd call Doug Morris (ex-Universal, ex-Warner, ex-Sony) to get him to come onboard as a CEO of that label, but in Morris' view a label that could not cut upfront checks to young artists would not stay in business for long.
Any promising artists would then be schmoozed and seduced by the labels who can cut advance checks and offer real money in the pocket today instead of abstract fairer revenue split down the road. Any existing top artists already have some label relationship that is hard to get out of. What you're left with is a bunch of nobodies, kinda like the MP3.com back in the days.
Especially in this case: the business isn’t in a high-margin niche; it has large direct competitors like Spotify, Apple, Google.
Also helped that my new living room receiver had Spotify integration but not Rdio.
When Rdio is gone there's going to be a huge hole in my life that needs filled with good design and experience browsing my music. iTunes is a shitshow. Spotify is ugly. Pandora is radio. It's all rubbish.
The Winamp revival cannot come soon enough.
They also have a decent "blogged 50" playlist which is recent/modern music.
Other than that, I mostly listen to kexp.org for a good mix of music. Sometimes for radio you can't beat the radio.
The on-demand services are more like a replacement for album/track purchases but I've found that bookmarking 10 or 20 favorite Shoutcast stations in anything from Winamp to VLC to any other desktop or mobile app that supports streaming mp3 is like having the best, human-programmed radio dial ever.
Even back in the early 2000's when I was stuck on 128k/sec cellular data I would hook my Treo up to the car stereo and stream 96kbps music when everyone else was paying for XM. Then with the move to third-gen data networks I got the bump to 800k/sec and streaming much nicer 128k-192k stuff was simple. Sound didn't beat a CD but it was better than satellite radio's compressed streams a lot of the time.
Even today, I usually listen to KEXP's stream or Devil's Night Radio or something from SomaFM before dicking around on Spotify or Youtube. There's just something to be said for finding stations that are programmed and run by people with a knowledge and love of music that you also may enjoy. Noticing themes or trends in strings of songs always puts a smile on my face in a way that Pandora or Spotify just never will.
Although I am an "edge case," this really punishes the hobbyist.
I'm at my wit's end. I liked the subscription service but now I've got to cancel and go to Apple Music.
Having to call support and beg once the 4-device limit and explain the rational (OCD and tweaking devices to get them "just right") is just "ugh."
The Apple iTunes PC/Mac 5-devices (de-auth any time from that device an unlimited number of times) with a 1-time yearly self device-reset is more reasonable.
Which platform? I've heard this criticism before but I don't understand it.
I use the service on Android, OS X, Windows, and Ubuntu...and while it may not be 100% beautiful throughout, I think it manages to balance decent aesthetics with decent UX better than most mainstream apps out there.
I want to view my tracs as they are in my folder. The only app I've found that can manage this is "Folder Player" but I have the feeling it's huge.
That's one reason I never really took to iTunes. I just keep my music on my computer (and occasionally on my phone) in folders with the structure Music\Artist\Album\(tracks). Then when I want to play something, I can either sort albums or artists or I can just point it at the folder I want it to read so it only shows what's in that folder (good for folders that I might make with various tracks from multiple albums).
Basically I'm a throwback and I just want everything to be Winamp I think.
I feel with you. It Really Whips the Llama's Ass.
Is this what you want? http://spotiamb.com/
Now I'm looking around to see if it would be possible to import the contents of that CSV into another service. It looks like Spotify has an API to add a track to a user: https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/save-tracks-user/
And there's a third-party API some folks cooked up for Google's service: http://unofficial-google-music-api.readthedocs.org/en/latest...
Might have to play with them this weekend.
It's enough to turn me off of cloud-based music services entirely, honestly. I'm only considering possibly ever subscribing to Apple Music because they let you upload tracks you own that they don't have. I hear Google Music does the same thing? Or maybe I'll finally set up that Plex server...
But as much I wanted to love Rdio, the app (Android in particular) had many bugs that would cause it to crash or lock up, and some that would send my network connection off into the weeds, requiring (at least) an airplane-mode reset.
And despite the claims of "elegant, groundbreaking", what music app has Search on slide-out besides Rdio? With results that appear in a 1/3-size screen?
Time to figure out how to get my playlists over to Rhapsody, the Little Music Service That Could.
- Buggy desktop app (used Flash player and would eat 100% CPU)
- Buggy mobile app [1]
- Restricted library (lots of tracks marked as "not available in your country", which defeats the point of having an online streaming service).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7074056