Rdio First Impressions

Rdio (pronounced “r-dee-oh”), the new cloud-based music service from the guys who started Skype, launched this week, and I was lucky enough to snag one of the 3-day preview invitations. To give a bit of background, here’s the rundown of the new site: - For $9.99 a month, get unlimited streaming of their catalog – which includes thousands of major label artists – both online and through their various mobile (Blackberry, iPhone, etc.) applications. - For $4.99 a month, get unlimited web-only access. Listen to as many songs as you want, but only on Rdio.com - Using Rdio Desktop, sync your iTunes library with the Rdio catalog, making browsing the music you already own even easier. (This system isn’t perfect; out of my 11,000+ songs, they were able to correctly match about 4,800 of them.) - Download MP3’s of the songs you like to your computer for about the same price as a normal iTunes download (about $10 for a full album) 24 hours into my preview account, here are some first impressions: - Rdio couldn’t have come along at a better time. There are rumors of a new cloud-based iTunes service being announced next week to possibly take the place of the now-defunct Lala (RIP), and Spotify still appears to have serious legal obstacles standing in the way of a full US launch. For Rdio’s sake, I hope they can siphon off some subscribers before either of those behemoths come to life. - Whether Rdio is your cup of tea or not depends largely on how you listen to music. -If you only listen to music on your internet-connected computer or smartphone, subscribing is a no-brainer. For the cost of one album a month, you have unlimited access to millions of songs. Some have complained about the breadth of their catalog, but I can only imagine it growing from here. -On the other hand, if you tend to listen to music on a traditional iPod classic (like I do), don’t have a smartphone, or are still skeptical of cloud computing and prefer to own your music, I see Rdio as more of a previewing service. Lala was great because you could sign up for free and listen to any song in their catalog once, which made it perfect for previewing and samplig new music. With Rdio, you can preview all you like with a monthly subscription. To some, that might be worth the $4.99/$9.99 a month. I’m not sure yet. - I’m still undecided on the importance on the iTunes-matching feature. Lala did the same thing (and did it much better) for free. Rdio seems to only match your iTunes library for convenience-sake by putting it all in one place. Otherwise, you’d have to search the entire catalog to find what you wanted. Still, the whole catalog is “yours” anyways so I’m not sure that it’d be a big deal. - Spotify is free to join (unless you want a monthly “premium” membership) and offers unlimited ad-supported streams. It hasn’t launched in the US yet, but I think it’ll be a major player once it does. Only time will tell how much of an impact it’ll have on Rdio. Has anyone else gotten hands-on with it? What do you think?