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Pandora to Buy Rdio Assets for $75M, Rdio Files Ch.11, Will Shutter Service

374 points by MarlonPro 11y ago

uptown 11y ago
There's not enough listeners for the number of music services. If your service stumbles, it's easy to move onto something else, so you really only get one or no chances to convince your potential customers. My experience with Rdio was one of frustration. Their desktop player was buggy and frequently failed to play anything at all. When it did work, I found the consistency of the music catalog to be unreliable. One week they'd have the license to an album I wanted to listen-to, and then they'd lose it, and I couldn't listen to that anymore. I'm not sure what factors were at-play on their end to cause that to happen, but it was a horrible experience for he listener. I wanted to like Rdio, but they failed at the basics in my experience.
- buttscicles 11y ago
  My experience was mostly the same. The mobile apps were awful when your connection was spotty and frequently refused to actually play music or skip track, meaning I'd have to kill the process. Being unable to add local tracks like I can with spotify is a killer feature that was missing as well.
- thinkingkong 11y ago
  Interesting. The only reason I used rdio was because of all of the good initial impressions designers and product people I knew had of it. The biggest assumption it made was that people understood the 'sliding pane' UI as being self evident, and it wasn't. Wouldn't the only reason there being limited choice be because of the way music deals are structured? I'm not familiar enough with how those work but having a mismatch of payouts / winning labels vs listeners would be a problem.
- JonFish85 11y ago
  "There's not enough listeners for the number of music services. If your service stumbles, it's easy to move onto something else, so you really only get one or no chances to convince your potential customers." I agree, and even feel more strongly about it. Even if you don't stumble, it's hard to compete with Google and Apple at this point, because they have their services tightly tied in with their other products. Buy an iPhone (hell, or even a laptop or tablet), and Apple Music is integrated out of the box. Same with Google Music. Personally I think Spotify is doomed to fail (for various definitions of "fail") for the same reason. There are some people who want their music decoupled from their OS/hardware, but I think there are so many more than want it to "just work", and I think that Apple & Google have a better shot at that than anyone else, at this point.
  - p0wnd 11y ago
    I won't switch from Spotify though because it meets my needs and furthermore they keep innovating. One thing I can look forward to in getting back to the office on Monday is my new week's playlist that Spotify creates for me. I listen to a wide variety of music and they have helped me discover a lot o f artists and songs I'm really into.
    - dom96 11y ago
      Totally agree. Spotify's weekly discover playlists have made me look forward to Mondays.
    - derrickdirge 11y ago
      'Discover Weekly' is the one feature keeping me with Spotify. Their UI annoys me on a daily basis, but I've got a lot of great recommendations from them. Frankly, I wish Apple would mirror this feature, though it goes against their whole 'human curated playlists' philosophy.
- KingMob 11y ago
  Catalog consistency was probably a licensing issue and not technological, I should point out. Same reason movies just disappear from Netflix every so often.
  - uptown 11y ago
    It absolutely was a licensing issue. But it results in a horrible experience for the end user.
- daigoba66 11y ago
  Apple, etc., should open an API and SDK to allow developers to build better and innovative UIs on top of the data and streams. The UI is what I enjoyed most about Rdio and enjoy least about Apple Music and others.
- cruelfate 11y ago
  As a music nerd, no, it's not easy to move along to another service. Rdio was the closest thing to a social environment that was all about the music, not one's irrelevant social graph. I benefitted from studying hundreds of curated playlists, whose affinity was learned from what the site offered. Spotify, et al, doesn't do that.
- cruelfate 11y ago
  As a music nerd, no, it's not easy to move along to another service. Rdio was the closest thing to a social environment that was all about the music, not one's irrelevant social graph. I benefitted from studying hundreds of curated playlists, whose affinity was learned from what the site offered. Spotify, et al, doesn't do that.
- cruelfate 11y ago
  As a music nerd, no, it's not easy to move along to another service. Rdio was the closest thing to a social environment that was all about the music, not one's irrelevant social graph. I benefitted from studying hundreds of curated playlists, whose affinity was learned from what the site offered. Spotify, et al, doesn't do that.
zymhan 11y ago
I'm interested to see if/how Pandora changes their service after this. It's been a while since they added a new feature.
wylie 11y ago
Any detail about what's going to happen to existing user accounts? As an Rdio subscriber, I want to make sure my existing collections and playlists don't just get deleted.
- oldfatslow 11y ago
  "Rdio's service will not be interrupted today. We will have more updates in the coming weeks on what this process means for your Rdio account, but for the time being the service continues unchanged." From there blog.
- gitah 11y ago
  I'm 110% sure subscriber accounts are part of the 'Key Assets' Pandora bought from Rdio.
  - livingparadox 11y ago
    "...in the call today McAndrews made clear that those numbers [of users] are irrelevant since that service is shutting down, not transferring."
    - garrettboatman 11y ago
      Rekt.
    - gitah 11y ago
      How does that indicate Pandora doesn't get the contact information and payment information of Rdio subscribers?
      - livingparadox 11y ago
        "not transferring"
bsimpson 11y ago
I've been told by people in the position to know that the 2010-era streaming services (Rdio, Spotify, Mog) were all effectively the same company: owned mostly by the music studios (in exchange for licenses) with a minority stake for each's particular founders/investors. As Dalton Caldwell cautioned in 2011, licensing costs make music startups are nigh impossible [1]. For people who are willing to pay for a music service, it seems pretty hard to beat Google Music's value proposition. Because it's a Google service, it can afford to compete as much as it needs to on price, and it also includes ad-free access to all of YouTube. I certainly wouldn't want to be a startup vying for that same $10 per month against one of the most popular content plays in the history of the Internet. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTOlrN5-UGU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTOlrN5-UGU
- jmtulloss 11y ago
  As an Rdio shareholder I was told that the labels did have equity, but certainly not a majority stake. I'm not sure exactly how much they had.
  - bsimpson 11y ago
    You'd certainly know better than I would. It seemed strange to me as well (esp after seeing how much outside funding they had raised), but the people I heard it from seemed both credible and adamant. It's also possible that the cap table has changed since I heard this (years ago) and now.
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      Any chance we'll get to see the cap table now that Rdio is being liquidated?
  - uzi 11y ago
    I guess this is a good place to give a shout out to jmtulloss, who is one of the many talented engineers responsible for implementing the Rdio web interface... ... as well as plug https://spotbot.qa/ https://spotbot.qa/, which he is working on with another early Rdio employee.
tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
that is really unfortunate, I much prefer Rdio's web interface to Spotify's and for all the years I've been a subscriber it's been rock solid, on the other hand I do think I am likely not the typical user (100% on desktop, mostly listens to full albums rather than random songs, a lot of classical music, etc.) When Rdio shuts down I am really not sure where I will be able to go for a comparable experience, Spotify for some reason appears to have random holes in their classical catalog compared to Rdio, I am also not sure if Apple music is useable without an iDevice. what other alternatives can others suggest for users in Canada?
- arthurfm 11y ago
  > I am also not sure if Apple music is useable without an iDevice. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.android.music https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr... http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/11/16/apple-music-review-i-was-ready-to-hate-it-but-apple-got-me-singing-a-different-tune/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/11/16/apple-music-review-i...
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- swsieber 11y ago
  That depends - since you listen mostly to full albums perhaps you could by an album a month and put them on a private streaming server a la groovebasin/sandstorm.io?
- JonathonW 11y ago
  Apple has an Apple Music app [1] on the Play Store for Android, and is accessible through iTunes (ugh...) on the desktop on both Windows and Mac. (No Linux support unless you can coax iTunes into running on Wine, and no web UI.) Apple Music's reasonably viable as long as you're only using it on mobile; its viability on the desktop really depends on your ability to tolerate iTunes. Suffice it to say that I remained a Spotify user after my Apple Music trial was up, and I'm otherwise heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.android.music&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...
danieleggert 11y ago
Another Janus Friis company to add to the list.
crabasa 11y ago
Here is Rdio's announcement of the shutdown: http://blog.rdio.com/us/2015/11/important-news-from-rdio.html http://blog.rdio.com/us/2015/11/important-news-from-rdio.htm...
blackaspen 11y ago
Bummer. I really like(liked?) Rdio. I've been a subscriber for several years -- the UI I find to be pretty good, but their mobile apps are garbage. So, who wants to write up an Rdio -> Spotify migration tool?
- Futurebot 11y ago
  Since there's no bulk export or migration tool, I pulled everything out of the .artists_list element from /favorites/albums/ so I can rebuild my collection elsewhere.
  - pca2 11y ago
    just found this Chrome extension that allows you to export playlists https://twitter.com/frank_chimero/status/666373969394708481 https://twitter.com/frank_chimero/status/666373969394708481
- pca2 11y ago
  There already is Spotify -> Rdio tools like http://resp.in/ http://resp.in/ Now we just need the reverse.
- enra 11y ago
  I was a Spotify user from the first betas, but switched to Rdio couple of years ago. Better designed and good music recommendations. Sad day :(
- acdha 11y ago
  I was just looking at this one: https://github.com/jacobian/rdio2spotify https://github.com/jacobian/rdio2spotify
  - cbabraham 11y ago
    it worked!
- rraval 11y ago
  Not what you asked for, but I wrote an Rdio to Google Music exporter a while back: https://github.com/rraval/rdio-gmusic https://github.com/rraval/rdio-gmusic
nathancahill 11y ago
Interesting way to exit. Is that common?
- elif 11y ago
  That's the part that intrigued me. Chapter 11 means the original investors get the short end right? why would they agree to this acquisition? or do they get money back, and tax-payers cover the losses?
  - btian 11y ago
    Shareholders get will nothing, but debt holders will still get paid in proportion of how much they're owed.
    - eldavido 11y ago
      Incorrect. The law varies state-by-state but the actual process is closer to the following: (1) Company agrees to file for bankruptcy, usually because they feel it's in the owners' (shareholders) best interest to do so, in terms of recovering as much as possible from the "bad" company, vs. trying to keep the company running. (2) Company's management comes up with a plan to distribute company's assets (cash, servers, IP, whatever) more or less "fairly" among the creditors. A big part of this is preventing management from giving a sweetheart deal on something worth a lot, to their friend/relative/whoever (e.g. selling the customer list for $1 to their friend's company), vs. making sure everyone who has a claim on said assets can get the most back as possible. A lot of arguments happen here, this is the main point of the rdio situation, whether the sale to Pandora is the best possible outcome for everyone. (3) The company's assets get distributed as follows: Employees -- most states give employees' unpaid wages preferential treatment in bankruptcy, under the same legal doctrine of why employees can't be held civilly liable (sued) doing something under control of their employer -- employers have a general duty to care for/protect their employees. (Note that neither the high priority bankruptcy payment, nor the liability protection, applies to contractors. Keep this in mind next time you think contractors are "overpaid" earning 2x as much as a W2, on top of the fact that they get no benefits and have to pay both sides of FICA) Secured creditors -- any creditor whose claim is "secured" or "backed up" by some kind of asset, e.g. mortgage lenders. Unsecured creditors -- 1099 contractors, lessors, all vendors, debenture (bond) holders, basically anyone who claims they're "owed" by the company. And finally, lastly, equity holders (stockholders). They don't necessary have to get zero, but often do, because they're so far down the list of who gets paid (what investment bankers call "capital structure seniority" -- they're very junior). So yes, it might be more or less ratable within each class, but there's no guarantee that "shareholders will get nothing", nor is it strictly proportional. This is the garbage collection of capitalism and I find it fascinating.
disposition2 11y ago
As someone who switched to Rdio from Spotify because the former has not terrible music discovery, this is unfortunate. Looks like I'll be switching again...it would be nice to find a streaming service that was about music discovery rather than forcing the latest garbage down your throat. Although who knows, maybe Spotify's radio now plays more than 10 songs...
- KingMob 11y ago
  Yeah, Rdio's "radio" way much better than Spotify's. In general, I think their interface was better, too, though Spotify has lyrics and Rdio doesn't.
- dgavey 11y ago
  I second that, I have discovered more new artists, and new releases through Rdio than anywhere else. Hopefully their competition does better with discovery in the future.
- vlunkr 11y ago
  Spotify now has a playlist called discover weekly or something that is songs they pick for you once a week, and in my experience it's actually pretty good. I've discovered several artists that way. And I also found Spotify radio to be awful.
  - infecto 11y ago
    I love Discover Weekly. It is the one thing that has really stood out to me. I have found a lot of songs/artists that I love using this service.
    - colmvp 11y ago
      Did they develop this in-house or acquire a technology for this?
      - bananaoomarang 11y ago
narrator 11y ago
Music is a dying industry because there's too much good free music floating around. Look at labels like http://www.ektoplazm.com/ http://www.ektoplazm.com/ . The music is 100% free. There's not even a buy button anywhere. Long distance phone calls and music are a glimpse of our future where things are too cheap to meter. The dying industries are trying to find ways to create artificial scarcity to go back to the old way of doing things.
- autarch 11y ago
  It makes sense that there'd be free options for a genre like trance or other electronica that can be made by one person on a computer. However, if you enjoy music that features live instruments I just don't see how it could be free. There's too many people involved who need to eat.
  - cbr 11y ago
    > if you enjoy music that features live instruments I just > don't see how it could be free. There's too many people > involved who need to eat. One model people talk about is where recorded music is free, this boosts popularity, you fund the recordings through more people coming to your live shows. If you do 40 live shows a year, and giving away your music brings in 30 more people at each show paying $20 each, that's $24k: enough for a new album each year.
    - welly 11y ago
      But not enough to eat. Certainly not for two, three or four (or more) members of a band.
      - cbr 11y ago
        $24k is the marginal cost of the recording. In this model the band's living is paid for by touring.
  - cookiecaper 11y ago
    Whether you want it to be free or not, it's effectively impossible to enforce scarcity over resources that can be trivially digitized. People don't pay for music anymore because it's very easy and low-risk to get it without paying for it, and the internet guarantees it's going to stay that way. Even if you can get everyone to pay for Google Music, that's $10/mo from someone who used to spend $20/CD and potentially bought several of those each month. The fact is that it's now much harder to collect money for musical recordings. I don't think anything is going to change about that.
nbarbettini 11y ago
I've used Rdio for a few years now, and this sucks. Spotify's UI doesn't compete.
- atourgates 11y ago
  I tried out both a couple years ago, found them to be pretty comparable in terms of music catalog, and chose Rdio because I prefer their interface. Recently, I've been noticing that some of the "people" I follow have stopped publishing playlists to Rdio in favor of Spotify, so I've been considering the switch. But it's a shame to have to leave Rdio's great HTML5 web interface for either Spotify's native app or flash.
  - jnet 11y ago
    Spotify has a web player as well
    - _jomo 11y ago
      well, actually they have a web site with a Flash player.
- luckycharms810 11y ago
  Yep, completely agree. I think Spotify had a really good opportunity to innovate as a streaming music player but instead they created a Frankenstein's itunes. I'm not mad that they copied an existing interface but that they copied one that was terrible to begin with. I really hope that the work Rdio did in terms of their UI doesn't go to waste.
_jomo 11y ago
I really liked Grooveshark because it had a proper HTML5 player before they shut down. I was looking for alternatives and recently found Rdio and was quite happy with it, actually it has a lot in common with Grooveshark (e.g. user stations). Both Spotify and Deezer have web apps but they require Flash. Spotify has forwarded people asking for an HTML player to the forum and they have successfully ignored it for years. I sent Deezer a mail, they told me to "rest assured we are considering all options" and "if a transition is made it will take some time to implement". Are there any alternatives that do not require a custom client or Flash (that also work in Europe)?
- smt88 11y ago
  The Google Play Music library is excellent (I think it's still the biggest). You could try something like this: http://bluestackstutorial.com/2015/07/google-play-music-for-pc/ http://bluestackstutorial.com/2015/07/google-play-music-for-...
  - _jomo 11y ago
    Someone else just pointed out Google Play Music as well. Apparently it works in the Browser without Flash?
    - agentdrtran 11y ago
      Yes, no flash needed.
    - smt88 11y ago
      It does need Flash, according to Google anyway[1]. People might be missing the Flash requirement because Flash is bundled with Chrome. 1. https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/1114577?hl=en https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/1114577?hl=en
      - dumol 11y ago
        The default player needs the Flash plugin, but there's an experimental HTML5 player that works in Chrome/Chromium (even the BSD ports). I have used it almost exclusively for the past 9 months or so, and had no problems with it. Here's how to enable it: https://www.maketecheasier.com/enable-html5-playback-google-play-music/ https://www.maketecheasier.com/enable-html5-playback-google-...
danr4 11y ago
As someone who thinks Rdio is the best streaming service for diehard music fans, this really pains me. With that being said, I definitely saw it coming. No meaningful technical upgrades to the platform have been made in the past year, while keeping the technical deficiencies. the mobile apps are a disaster, and overall I had the feeling they were busy searching for a way to stay afloat. Sad day indeed.
danr4 11y ago
As someone who thinks Rdio is the best streaming service for diehard music fans, this really pains me. With that being said, I definitely saw it coming. No meaningful technical upgrades to the platform have been made in the past year, while keeping the technical deficiencies. the mobile apps are a disaster, and overall I had the feeling they were busy searching for a way to stay afloat. Sad day indeed.
ehmorris 11y ago
Does anyone know a good way of exporting my rdio "history" data? I have years of data in there.
- pit 11y ago
  How do you want it?
- ehmorris 11y ago
  Ah here's a solution: make a cURL request for all your history data. Simple way to get a well formatted request: * Go to the history tab (http://www.rdio.com/people/username/history/ http://www.rdio.com/people/username/history/) and pull up the inspector * Scroll down once or twice and go to the network tab * Find the `getHistoryForUser` request and right-click it, select "copy as cURL" * Paste into your editor and change the "start" param to 0 and the "count" param to 99999 * Make the cURL request. Boom, no rate limiting. I got 3.5mb of history (though it seems to only go back 1 year.
  - JeremyHerrman 11y ago
    Thanks!!
- bgentry 11y ago
  this tweet (linked elsewhere in the thread) references a Chrome extension that lets you export any of your playlists or your entire collection to a CSV: https://twitter.com/frank_chimero/status/666373969394708481 https://twitter.com/frank_chimero/status/666373969394708481
  - ehmorris 11y ago
    Ah I've already done that, but I also have a listening history I want to preserve. I should have been using last.fm :( I did manage to get the past year though, via a comment below.
samstave 11y ago
Pandora: Rags to riches poster child of SV: CEO cant make payroll; begs employees to stay and they do.... Pays $75,000,000 for assets of a competitor a few years later.
- Apocryphon 11y ago
  Based out of Oakland before it was cool
- thrownaway2424 11y ago
  What did the employees get out of it?
  - samstave 11y ago
    Jobs?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
craigds 11y ago
This is a real shame. I just discovered Rdio about a month ago and it was a breath of fresh air coming from Pandora (repetitive music discovery, and you can't play a specific song/album) and Spotify (awful UI, cluttered and full of bugs, and not web based). I also had this handy bookmarklet to mute most of the ads: https://gist.github.com/craigds/14db5022a00b946ee14f https://gist.github.com/craigds/14db5022a00b946ee14f I have no interest in a mobile app or downloading content. Streaming whatever I want whenever I want on my laptop is important, and having a good discovery mechanism is important too. Pandora and Spotify aren't up to scratch. I don't think there are any decent alternatives to Rdio, though I just googled and discovered Google Play Music is now available in NZ, so maybe I'll give that a go.
- ikawe 11y ago
  This > This is a real shame. And this > I also had this handy bookmarklet to mute most of the ads: https://gist.github.com/craigds/14db5022a00b946ee14f https://gist.github.com/craigds/14db5022a00b946ee14f Might be related.
  - craigds 11y ago
    mute, not block. Rdio still gets paid.
mbrock 11y ago
I subscribe to Spotify. If they would just let me view "My Albums" (which is basically all I'm ever interested in) as an alphabetical list instead of a canvas of enormous pictures (4x2 fit on my screen), that would make me so happy. Every time they continuously deploy one of those "please upgrade" popups, which is nearly every day (pretty annoying BTW, can't you just upgrade silently? I've never even noticed anything change after one of these upgrades, I don't care, especially not in the exact moment when I'm about to relax and put on an album), I hope they'll have fixed this. I really loathe how the streaming services don't allow me to customize my UX in any way. Especially when it's harder to find albums in their clients than in a shelf of CDs. From what I can tell from random Google Music screenshots, it's also oriented around the "grid of enormous pictures" paradigm. :(
- criley2 11y ago
  In Spotify, instead of "saving album to My Music" I choose to create a playlist of the album. It's just drag and drop to create the playlist on desktop. I choose to sort those into folders based on genre/artist/album, which works well for me.
  - mbrock 11y ago
    Oh yeah, I have some of those old playlists cluttering up my sidebar... Wow, I didn't know there were folders! Thanks, that might work for me too.
gldnspud 11y ago
Too bad the now-defunct Rdio button on my Roku remote can't be remapped.
jeremyrwelch 11y ago
Rdio made a mistake by trying to compete directly with Spotify. And Pandora is making a huge mistake by shutting down the service and losing a valuable niche group of users. Everyone I know who actually uses Rdio is DIE HARD (I see evidence of this in the comments too). The users I know are pro audio guys, musicians, programmers, artists, etc who use the app 6+ hours a day across desktop and mobile. Rdio could easily carve out a dedicated customer base at the high-end who would pay MUCH MORE for a Pro version (I'd do $50 a month).
- tallerholler 11y ago
  ever since I discovered rdio a year or so ago I am always telling friends etc.. I think their UI is superior and the experience is just better than e.g. pandora imo...
  - jeremyrwelch 11y ago
    Exactly. I've recruited at least 4 friends to use the service. How many hours a day would you estimate you use it?
    - viiralvx 11y ago
      I constantly use the service. I download songs to listen to offline while driving, streaming albums / playlists while coding, and if I'm at home and chilling, I normally have the Rdio Roku app playing music while I'm cooking or keep my laptop on and connected to Bluetooth while remote controlling it from my phone (phone notifications over Bluetooth audio get annoying). It's an amazing service and I'm really sad to see it go. :/
    - tallerholler 11y ago
      I listen to it on and off all day at work most days...
- fredkbloggs 11y ago
  Such is the way of the world. 50,000 customers willing to pay $50 a month aren't worth the trouble, especially if they're even slightly demanding. Everyone wants the 50 million users willing to put up with ads that bring in $3 a month or are willing to pay $5 or $10.
bananaoomarang 11y ago
Honestly, if Spotify had a redesign I don’t think there’d be another choice.
jonah 11y ago
Super bummed. I've been a subscriber from the very beginning. Loved their interfaces and service far more than any of the alternatives. (Though these days 90% of my Rdio listening is through Sonos, but still it worked great.) You'll be missed.
hobo_mark 11y ago
Ctrl+F Soundcloud.. crickets I once made a chrome extension to add global keyboard shortcuts to Soundcloud and now that is literally all I listen to all day (I know, artists aren't getting a penny from me and that is bad, especially for small indies, I would buy much more music off bandcamp if the ux wasn't so atrocious). My point is, surely I'm not the only one here using SC exclusively? Just curious.
- theGimp 11y ago
  Re: global keyboard shortcuts. I found https://github.com/msfeldstein/chrome-media-keys https://github.com/msfeldstein/chrome-media-keys a while back. It's amazing. It's not flawless, but it adds global controls to most websites.
- slouch 11y ago
  Just yesterday, I tried to find an album that Scott Melker had uploaded to SoundCloud. It's gone, and he posted this announcement https://soundcloud.com/scottmelker/please-listen-a-message-on-my-soundcloud-takedowns-and-account https://soundcloud.com/scottmelker/please-listen-a-message-o... So, SoundCloud can't present me with the discography of Black Sabbath, and a smaller artist I enjoy can't even keep his music on the service.
- Wingman4l7 11y ago
  The problem with Soundcloud is that the freely available "preview" versions are 128 kbps transcodes,[1] which is pretty mediocre quality (and possibly worse, if the source was lossy to begin with). [1]: http://uploadandmanage.help.soundcloud.com/customer/portal/articles/2162441-uploading-requirements http://uploadandmanage.help.soundcloud.com/customer/portal/a...
jacquesm 11y ago
What assets do they have worth $75M?
- antidaily 11y ago
  75,000 Aeron chairs.
rekoros 11y ago
I was one of Rdio's first employees (3rd) and have been a happy subscriber since Craig got billing to work. After FB employees got free Rdio, they gave Rdio employees free Rdio as well, but I kept paying—to retain the right to bitch. (I got a free account for my wife though.) My entire extended family have been paying for and swearing by Rdio for years. I was introduced to Erlang at Rdio (this shaped the future of my career) and worked on the original implementation of the Heavy Rotation feature. I walked around the office asking people "Does this look right? How about this?" I'd upgrade Erlang code in production by hot-reloading the heavy rotation module, and walk around some more. It was fun! In 2011, I realized that Rdio will never succeed due to lack of fanatical leadership—you can't have a company with absent founders, that's just not how it works—and left. I've been expecting this sort of an "exit" for a while. Today I work at my own startup (sameroom.io) and every single day I'm grateful for the Rdio experience—mostly as a cautionary tale, unfortunately. And now, we have to deal with this: "Are we really going to start using Spotify after so many years of hating on it?" —our 15-year-old.
- mbesto 11y ago
  > "Are we really going to start using Spotify after so many years of hating on it?" —our 15-year-old. Genuinely curious here - why are so many techies desperately passionate (both positive and negative) about choice of unseemly unnecessary tech products? I feel like there is this peculiar subculture of tech-minded folk who defend at odds their tech choices. "Slack is the best" "Hell no, IRC has been around for years!" "Let's fight!" I don't see any rational reason to "hate" on the success of a company or a brand...
  - willtheperson 11y ago
    "I chose X so to validate my choice I will tell you why Z is the worst!" It happens everywhere. Some get more caught up in it (Video Game console, iPhone / Galaxy, etc.). Marketing tries to play into this a bit for free promotion. Make you feel intelligent for choosing them and you're part of a club so you'll spread their gospel.
  - epa 11y ago
    The tech generation grew up in a 'free' culture of internet: illegal downloads, open source, pro bono collaboration. Paying for something that is equally equivalent to something that was free for decades usually is a tough sell. This doesnt apply to all people.
dioltas 11y ago
And I just switched from Spotify to rdio. What timing!
bndw 11y ago
Sad to hear this- I've been a paying Rdio customer for a few years now and have been thrilled with the service overall. Given the alternatives, I'll likely attempt purchasing albums from Amazon, or another DRM-free alternative.
bennesvig 11y ago
I've been a paying subscriber of Rdio for at least 3+ years. I loved that Rdio let me explore other people's playlists, often leading to discover new favorite songs. Also never liked Spotify's UI. I'm bummed to switch.
badmadrad 11y ago
I just checked out Youtube Music today and its pretty awesome and you are able to leverage all the great catalog of music uploaded to Youtube. I'm surprised more people are not using it/talking about it. I really do see this as a spotify killer if its gets some steam and some of the discovery features you get with spotify.
- Wingman4l7 11y ago
  If Youtube Music Key is not drawing directly from curated uploads from artists, it's going to be an opaque mess of poor quality lossy uploads.
verelo 11y ago
This has been an interesting 5 years for this space. I had Grooveshark, but they didn't have an iOS app, so when i switched from Android I went to Rdio. When Spotify launched in Canada, I tried it, and quickly switched over simply because the app was not complete junk. The Rdio song offering was fine, just as good as Spotify as far as I could tell. The Rdio app, was terrible. 50% of the time it would "play" but no sound would come out, the other 50% it would sometimes work / sometimes just crash or lock up. You cannot have a product that is half assed, when you are still trying to win the market, and even if you have won you still cant for very long.
tibbydude 11y ago
Looks like we are going to switch over the kids to Apple Music for Android when it is stable enough. Rdio was at least available in South Africa unlike Google Play Music and Spotify.
Qantourisc 11y ago
Thinking of going back to buying CD's (or getting Flac files). Streaming services are to unreliable :/ They are only good for discovery.
- yason 11y ago
  It takes a lot of trust to lose a lot of trust. First there were records, then cassettes, then compact discs, and they all wore out. A plausible lifetime for something you bought was maybe 15-20 years: not really a problem but indeed a nuisance. You knew the day would come when the cassette would snap or the CD would just jump way too much. Moving to digital music was the big revolution. I could encode songs into files on my computer and I could replicate those literally forever. I would never, ever lose my music again, or be forced to buy it back in the de facto format of the next decade. Then came the streaming services. That meant convenience but it did trade in even worse life expectancy and uncertainty. Anyone could bet money that a digital streaming service in the 2000's would not be around 20 years later. But they did become popular, especially when mobile 3G/4G data appeared everywhere. Ironically, while it did become possible to stream anything anywhere, you could also fit all your audio files onto a memory card. Several times. At a negligible cost. Surely you would only have your own collection with you, but that collection was actually hundreds or thousands of compact discs all compressed into a manageable amount of data. For reference, I still have my music in ogg/mp3 format and digitally bought albums as flac. I didn't have plans to move away from that and I still don't. If I want my music in a new phone or in my car, I'll just replicate my collection to a new device or memory card. And I then have the exactly same collection on my phone that I have on my desktop. And my work computer. I still have my 80's-90's CDs in the closet but I've ripped the most important albums no later than the turn of the millennium, at the latest. The setup is so manageable and dirt cheap that I can't but wonder what would it take to replace it.
mkent 11y ago
I've put together my own simple rdio -> Google play music migration: https://gist.github.com/mdkent/9d48a4142362a2815b09 https://gist.github.com/mdkent/9d48a4142362a2815b09
_djo_ 11y ago
This is really disappointing, Rdio was one of the few music streaming services legally available in South Africa. It's pretty much just Deezer and Apple Music left now. Google Play Music, Pandora and Spotify are all region-locked.
wobbleblob 11y ago
Ahh, Pandora. They were ahead of their time at one time. Then suddenly and without warning, they kicked me out. "We don't want your filthy money, foreign scum. English speaking countries only!" Yes, I know how proxies and VPNs work, but I'm not going to spend money and break the terms of service just to trick a company into accepting my money. If they don't want to do business with me, then so be it. Spotify's recommendation algorithm isn't as good (ooh, you liked a song in Russian? that must mean you only want to hear Russian bands from now on, right?), but they don't think I'm too foreign for them.
- kyrre 11y ago
  isn't this due to complex licensing issues? i created my original rdio account while living in London, and then when i moved to Norway i decided to upgrade my subscription, at which point my playlists became unplayable as a large portion of songs were suddenly marked as "unavailable" in my region
  - wobbleblob 11y ago
    Spotify seems to have found a solution for these complex licensing issues. Netflix allows me to pay them money, but they have a different selection available depending on where I'm connecting from. Initially, Pandora gave the impression that they were working on it, but how long has it been, 10 years? They can go sit on the roof with a bunch of onions as far as I'm concerned.
    - kyrre 11y ago
      yeah, that's a fair point i guess
Grue3 11y ago
This is what will happen to every single streaming service eventually. It's hard to believe that 10 years down the line Apple Music, or Spotify, or Google whatever-it's-called-now will still be a thing. If you really like listening to music, make sure you either have it as physical media, or stored on your hard drive (yes, I still buy and rip CDs myself).

374 points by MarlonPro 11y ago

There's not enough listeners for the number of music services. If your service stumbles, it's easy to move onto something else, so you really only get one or no chances to convince your potential customers. My experience with Rdio was one of frustration. Their desktop player was buggy and frequently failed to play anything at all. When it did work, I found the consistency of the music catalog to be unreliable. One week they'd have the license to an album I wanted to listen-to, and then they'd lose it, and I couldn't listen to that anymore. I'm not sure what factors were at-play on their end to cause that to happen, but it was a horrible experience for he listener. I wanted to like Rdio, but they failed at the basics in my experience.

buttscicles 11y ago
My experience was mostly the same. The mobile apps were awful when your connection was spotty and frequently refused to actually play music or skip track, meaning I'd have to kill the process. Being unable to add local tracks like I can with spotify is a killer feature that was missing as well.
thinkingkong 11y ago
Interesting. The only reason I used rdio was because of all of the good initial impressions designers and product people I knew had of it. The biggest assumption it made was that people understood the 'sliding pane' UI as being self evident, and it wasn't. Wouldn't the only reason there being limited choice be because of the way music deals are structured? I'm not familiar enough with how those work but having a mismatch of payouts / winning labels vs listeners would be a problem.
JonFish85 11y ago
"There's not enough listeners for the number of music services. If your service stumbles, it's easy to move onto something else, so you really only get one or no chances to convince your potential customers." I agree, and even feel more strongly about it. Even if you don't stumble, it's hard to compete with Google and Apple at this point, because they have their services tightly tied in with their other products. Buy an iPhone (hell, or even a laptop or tablet), and Apple Music is integrated out of the box. Same with Google Music. Personally I think Spotify is doomed to fail (for various definitions of "fail") for the same reason. There are some people who want their music decoupled from their OS/hardware, but I think there are so many more than want it to "just work", and I think that Apple & Google have a better shot at that than anyone else, at this point.
- p0wnd 11y ago
  I won't switch from Spotify though because it meets my needs and furthermore they keep innovating. One thing I can look forward to in getting back to the office on Monday is my new week's playlist that Spotify creates for me. I listen to a wide variety of music and they have helped me discover a lot o f artists and songs I'm really into.
  - dom96 11y ago
    Totally agree. Spotify's weekly discover playlists have made me look forward to Mondays.
  - derrickdirge 11y ago
    'Discover Weekly' is the one feature keeping me with Spotify. Their UI annoys me on a daily basis, but I've got a lot of great recommendations from them. Frankly, I wish Apple would mirror this feature, though it goes against their whole 'human curated playlists' philosophy.
KingMob 11y ago
Catalog consistency was probably a licensing issue and not technological, I should point out. Same reason movies just disappear from Netflix every so often.
- uptown 11y ago
  It absolutely was a licensing issue. But it results in a horrible experience for the end user.
daigoba66 11y ago
Apple, etc., should open an API and SDK to allow developers to build better and innovative UIs on top of the data and streams. The UI is what I enjoyed most about Rdio and enjoy least about Apple Music and others.
cruelfate 11y ago
As a music nerd, no, it's not easy to move along to another service. Rdio was the closest thing to a social environment that was all about the music, not one's irrelevant social graph. I benefitted from studying hundreds of curated playlists, whose affinity was learned from what the site offered. Spotify, et al, doesn't do that.
cruelfate 11y ago
As a music nerd, no, it's not easy to move along to another service. Rdio was the closest thing to a social environment that was all about the music, not one's irrelevant social graph. I benefitted from studying hundreds of curated playlists, whose affinity was learned from what the site offered. Spotify, et al, doesn't do that.
cruelfate 11y ago
As a music nerd, no, it's not easy to move along to another service. Rdio was the closest thing to a social environment that was all about the music, not one's irrelevant social graph. I benefitted from studying hundreds of curated playlists, whose affinity was learned from what the site offered. Spotify, et al, doesn't do that.

zymhan 11y ago

I'm interested to see if/how Pandora changes their service after this. It's been a while since they added a new feature.

wylie 11y ago

Any detail about what's going to happen to existing user accounts? As an Rdio subscriber, I want to make sure my existing collections and playlists don't just get deleted.

oldfatslow 11y ago
"Rdio's service will not be interrupted today. We will have more updates in the coming weeks on what this process means for your Rdio account, but for the time being the service continues unchanged." From there blog.
gitah 11y ago
I'm 110% sure subscriber accounts are part of the 'Key Assets' Pandora bought from Rdio.
- livingparadox 11y ago
  "...in the call today McAndrews made clear that those numbers [of users] are irrelevant since that service is shutting down, not transferring."
  - garrettboatman 11y ago
    Rekt.
  - gitah 11y ago
    How does that indicate Pandora doesn't get the contact information and payment information of Rdio subscribers?
    - livingparadox 11y ago
      "not transferring"

bsimpson 11y ago

I've been told by people in the position to know that the 2010-era streaming services (Rdio, Spotify, Mog) were all effectively the same company: owned mostly by the music studios (in exchange for licenses) with a minority stake for each's particular founders/investors. As Dalton Caldwell cautioned in 2011, licensing costs make music startups are nigh impossible [1]. For people who are willing to pay for a music service, it seems pretty hard to beat Google Music's value proposition. Because it's a Google service, it can afford to compete as much as it needs to on price, and it also includes ad-free access to all of YouTube. I certainly wouldn't want to be a startup vying for that same $10 per month against one of the most popular content plays in the history of the Internet. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTOlrN5-UGU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTOlrN5-UGU

jmtulloss 11y ago
As an Rdio shareholder I was told that the labels did have equity, but certainly not a majority stake. I'm not sure exactly how much they had.
- bsimpson 11y ago
  You'd certainly know better than I would. It seemed strange to me as well (esp after seeing how much outside funding they had raised), but the people I heard it from seemed both credible and adamant. It's also possible that the cap table has changed since I heard this (years ago) and now.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Any chance we'll get to see the cap table now that Rdio is being liquidated?
- uzi 11y ago
  I guess this is a good place to give a shout out to jmtulloss, who is one of the many talented engineers responsible for implementing the Rdio web interface... ... as well as plug https://spotbot.qa/ https://spotbot.qa/, which he is working on with another early Rdio employee.

tetraodonpuffer 11y ago

that is really unfortunate, I much prefer Rdio's web interface to Spotify's and for all the years I've been a subscriber it's been rock solid, on the other hand I do think I am likely not the typical user (100% on desktop, mostly listens to full albums rather than random songs, a lot of classical music, etc.) When Rdio shuts down I am really not sure where I will be able to go for a comparable experience, Spotify for some reason appears to have random holes in their classical catalog compared to Rdio, I am also not sure if Apple music is useable without an iDevice. what other alternatives can others suggest for users in Canada?

arthurfm 11y ago
> I am also not sure if Apple music is useable without an iDevice. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.android.music https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr... http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/11/16/apple-music-review-i-was-ready-to-hate-it-but-apple-got-me-singing-a-different-tune/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/11/16/apple-music-review-i...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
swsieber 11y ago
That depends - since you listen mostly to full albums perhaps you could by an album a month and put them on a private streaming server a la groovebasin/sandstorm.io?
JonathonW 11y ago
Apple has an Apple Music app [1] on the Play Store for Android, and is accessible through iTunes (ugh...) on the desktop on both Windows and Mac. (No Linux support unless you can coax iTunes into running on Wine, and no web UI.) Apple Music's reasonably viable as long as you're only using it on mobile; its viability on the desktop really depends on your ability to tolerate iTunes. Suffice it to say that I remained a Spotify user after my Apple Music trial was up, and I'm otherwise heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.android.music&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...

danieleggert 11y ago

Another Janus Friis company to add to the list.

crabasa 11y ago

Here is Rdio's announcement of the shutdown: http://blog.rdio.com/us/2015/11/important-news-from-rdio.html http://blog.rdio.com/us/2015/11/important-news-from-rdio.htm...

blackaspen 11y ago

Bummer. I really like(liked?) Rdio. I've been a subscriber for several years -- the UI I find to be pretty good, but their mobile apps are garbage. So, who wants to write up an Rdio -> Spotify migration tool?

Futurebot 11y ago
Since there's no bulk export or migration tool, I pulled everything out of the .artists_list element from /favorites/albums/ so I can rebuild my collection elsewhere.
- pca2 11y ago
  just found this Chrome extension that allows you to export playlists https://twitter.com/frank_chimero/status/666373969394708481 https://twitter.com/frank_chimero/status/666373969394708481
pca2 11y ago
There already is Spotify -> Rdio tools like http://resp.in/ http://resp.in/ Now we just need the reverse.
enra 11y ago
I was a Spotify user from the first betas, but switched to Rdio couple of years ago. Better designed and good music recommendations. Sad day :(
acdha 11y ago
I was just looking at this one: https://github.com/jacobian/rdio2spotify https://github.com/jacobian/rdio2spotify
- cbabraham 11y ago
  it worked!
rraval 11y ago
Not what you asked for, but I wrote an Rdio to Google Music exporter a while back: https://github.com/rraval/rdio-gmusic https://github.com/rraval/rdio-gmusic

nathancahill 11y ago

Interesting way to exit. Is that common?

elif 11y ago
That's the part that intrigued me. Chapter 11 means the original investors get the short end right? why would they agree to this acquisition? or do they get money back, and tax-payers cover the losses?
- btian 11y ago
  Shareholders get will nothing, but debt holders will still get paid in proportion of how much they're owed.
  - eldavido 11y ago
    Incorrect. The law varies state-by-state but the actual process is closer to the following: (1) Company agrees to file for bankruptcy, usually because they feel it's in the owners' (shareholders) best interest to do so, in terms of recovering as much as possible from the "bad" company, vs. trying to keep the company running. (2) Company's management comes up with a plan to distribute company's assets (cash, servers, IP, whatever) more or less "fairly" among the creditors. A big part of this is preventing management from giving a sweetheart deal on something worth a lot, to their friend/relative/whoever (e.g. selling the customer list for $1 to their friend's company), vs. making sure everyone who has a claim on said assets can get the most back as possible. A lot of arguments happen here, this is the main point of the rdio situation, whether the sale to Pandora is the best possible outcome for everyone. (3) The company's assets get distributed as follows: Employees -- most states give employees' unpaid wages preferential treatment in bankruptcy, under the same legal doctrine of why employees can't be held civilly liable (sued) doing something under control of their employer -- employers have a general duty to care for/protect their employees. (Note that neither the high priority bankruptcy payment, nor the liability protection, applies to contractors. Keep this in mind next time you think contractors are "overpaid" earning 2x as much as a W2, on top of the fact that they get no benefits and have to pay both sides of FICA) Secured creditors -- any creditor whose claim is "secured" or "backed up" by some kind of asset, e.g. mortgage lenders. Unsecured creditors -- 1099 contractors, lessors, all vendors, debenture (bond) holders, basically anyone who claims they're "owed" by the company. And finally, lastly, equity holders (stockholders). They don't necessary have to get zero, but often do, because they're so far down the list of who gets paid (what investment bankers call "capital structure seniority" -- they're very junior). So yes, it might be more or less ratable within each class, but there's no guarantee that "shareholders will get nothing", nor is it strictly proportional. This is the garbage collection of capitalism and I find it fascinating.

disposition2 11y ago

As someone who switched to Rdio from Spotify because the former has not terrible music discovery, this is unfortunate. Looks like I'll be switching again...it would be nice to find a streaming service that was about music discovery rather than forcing the latest garbage down your throat. Although who knows, maybe Spotify's radio now plays more than 10 songs...

KingMob 11y ago
Yeah, Rdio's "radio" way much better than Spotify's. In general, I think their interface was better, too, though Spotify has lyrics and Rdio doesn't.
dgavey 11y ago
I second that, I have discovered more new artists, and new releases through Rdio than anywhere else. Hopefully their competition does better with discovery in the future.
vlunkr 11y ago
Spotify now has a playlist called discover weekly or something that is songs they pick for you once a week, and in my experience it's actually pretty good. I've discovered several artists that way. And I also found Spotify radio to be awful.
- infecto 11y ago
  I love Discover Weekly. It is the one thing that has really stood out to me. I have found a lot of songs/artists that I love using this service.
  - colmvp 11y ago
    Did they develop this in-house or acquire a technology for this?
    - bananaoomarang 11y ago

narrator 11y ago

Music is a dying industry because there's too much good free music floating around. Look at labels like http://www.ektoplazm.com/ http://www.ektoplazm.com/ . The music is 100% free. There's not even a buy button anywhere. Long distance phone calls and music are a glimpse of our future where things are too cheap to meter. The dying industries are trying to find ways to create artificial scarcity to go back to the old way of doing things.

autarch 11y ago
It makes sense that there'd be free options for a genre like trance or other electronica that can be made by one person on a computer. However, if you enjoy music that features live instruments I just don't see how it could be free. There's too many people involved who need to eat.
- cbr 11y ago
  > if you enjoy music that features live instruments I just > don't see how it could be free. There's too many people > involved who need to eat. One model people talk about is where recorded music is free, this boosts popularity, you fund the recordings through more people coming to your live shows. If you do 40 live shows a year, and giving away your music brings in 30 more people at each show paying $20 each, that's $24k: enough for a new album each year.
  - welly 11y ago
    But not enough to eat. Certainly not for two, three or four (or more) members of a band.
    - cbr 11y ago
      $24k is the marginal cost of the recording. In this model the band's living is paid for by touring.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  Whether you want it to be free or not, it's effectively impossible to enforce scarcity over resources that can be trivially digitized. People don't pay for music anymore because it's very easy and low-risk to get it without paying for it, and the internet guarantees it's going to stay that way. Even if you can get everyone to pay for Google Music, that's $10/mo from someone who used to spend $20/CD and potentially bought several of those each month. The fact is that it's now much harder to collect money for musical recordings. I don't think anything is going to change about that.

nbarbettini 11y ago

I've used Rdio for a few years now, and this sucks. Spotify's UI doesn't compete.

atourgates 11y ago
I tried out both a couple years ago, found them to be pretty comparable in terms of music catalog, and chose Rdio because I prefer their interface. Recently, I've been noticing that some of the "people" I follow have stopped publishing playlists to Rdio in favor of Spotify, so I've been considering the switch. But it's a shame to have to leave Rdio's great HTML5 web interface for either Spotify's native app or flash.
- jnet 11y ago
  Spotify has a web player as well
  - _jomo 11y ago
    well, actually they have a web site with a Flash player.
luckycharms810 11y ago
Yep, completely agree. I think Spotify had a really good opportunity to innovate as a streaming music player but instead they created a Frankenstein's itunes. I'm not mad that they copied an existing interface but that they copied one that was terrible to begin with. I really hope that the work Rdio did in terms of their UI doesn't go to waste.

_jomo 11y ago

I really liked Grooveshark because it had a proper HTML5 player before they shut down. I was looking for alternatives and recently found Rdio and was quite happy with it, actually it has a lot in common with Grooveshark (e.g. user stations). Both Spotify and Deezer have web apps but they require Flash. Spotify has forwarded people asking for an HTML player to the forum and they have successfully ignored it for years. I sent Deezer a mail, they told me to "rest assured we are considering all options" and "if a transition is made it will take some time to implement". Are there any alternatives that do not require a custom client or Flash (that also work in Europe)?

smt88 11y ago
The Google Play Music library is excellent (I think it's still the biggest). You could try something like this: http://bluestackstutorial.com/2015/07/google-play-music-for-pc/ http://bluestackstutorial.com/2015/07/google-play-music-for-...
- _jomo 11y ago
  Someone else just pointed out Google Play Music as well. Apparently it works in the Browser without Flash?
  - agentdrtran 11y ago
    Yes, no flash needed.
  - smt88 11y ago
    It does need Flash, according to Google anyway[1]. People might be missing the Flash requirement because Flash is bundled with Chrome. 1. https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/1114577?hl=en https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/1114577?hl=en
    - dumol 11y ago
      The default player needs the Flash plugin, but there's an experimental HTML5 player that works in Chrome/Chromium (even the BSD ports). I have used it almost exclusively for the past 9 months or so, and had no problems with it. Here's how to enable it: https://www.maketecheasier.com/enable-html5-playback-google-play-music/ https://www.maketecheasier.com/enable-html5-playback-google-...

danr4 11y ago

As someone who thinks Rdio is the best streaming service for diehard music fans, this really pains me. With that being said, I definitely saw it coming. No meaningful technical upgrades to the platform have been made in the past year, while keeping the technical deficiencies. the mobile apps are a disaster, and overall I had the feeling they were busy searching for a way to stay afloat. Sad day indeed.

danr4 11y ago

ehmorris 11y ago

Does anyone know a good way of exporting my rdio "history" data? I have years of data in there.

pit 11y ago
How do you want it?
ehmorris 11y ago
Ah here's a solution: make a cURL request for all your history data. Simple way to get a well formatted request: * Go to the history tab (http://www.rdio.com/people/username/history/ http://www.rdio.com/people/username/history/) and pull up the inspector * Scroll down once or twice and go to the network tab * Find the `getHistoryForUser` request and right-click it, select "copy as cURL" * Paste into your editor and change the "start" param to 0 and the "count" param to 99999 * Make the cURL request. Boom, no rate limiting. I got 3.5mb of history (though it seems to only go back 1 year.
- JeremyHerrman 11y ago
  Thanks!!
bgentry 11y ago
this tweet (linked elsewhere in the thread) references a Chrome extension that lets you export any of your playlists or your entire collection to a CSV: https://twitter.com/frank_chimero/status/666373969394708481 https://twitter.com/frank_chimero/status/666373969394708481
- ehmorris 11y ago
  Ah I've already done that, but I also have a listening history I want to preserve. I should have been using last.fm :( I did manage to get the past year though, via a comment below.

samstave 11y ago

Pandora: Rags to riches poster child of SV: CEO cant make payroll; begs employees to stay and they do.... Pays $75,000,000 for assets of a competitor a few years later.

Apocryphon 11y ago
Based out of Oakland before it was cool
thrownaway2424 11y ago
What did the employees get out of it?
- samstave 11y ago
  Jobs?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

craigds 11y ago

This is a real shame. I just discovered Rdio about a month ago and it was a breath of fresh air coming from Pandora (repetitive music discovery, and you can't play a specific song/album) and Spotify (awful UI, cluttered and full of bugs, and not web based). I also had this handy bookmarklet to mute most of the ads: https://gist.github.com/craigds/14db5022a00b946ee14f https://gist.github.com/craigds/14db5022a00b946ee14f I have no interest in a mobile app or downloading content. Streaming whatever I want whenever I want on my laptop is important, and having a good discovery mechanism is important too. Pandora and Spotify aren't up to scratch. I don't think there are any decent alternatives to Rdio, though I just googled and discovered Google Play Music is now available in NZ, so maybe I'll give that a go.

ikawe 11y ago
This > This is a real shame. And this > I also had this handy bookmarklet to mute most of the ads: https://gist.github.com/craigds/14db5022a00b946ee14f https://gist.github.com/craigds/14db5022a00b946ee14f Might be related.
- craigds 11y ago
  mute, not block. Rdio still gets paid.

mbrock 11y ago

I subscribe to Spotify. If they would just let me view "My Albums" (which is basically all I'm ever interested in) as an alphabetical list instead of a canvas of enormous pictures (4x2 fit on my screen), that would make me so happy. Every time they continuously deploy one of those "please upgrade" popups, which is nearly every day (pretty annoying BTW, can't you just upgrade silently? I've never even noticed anything change after one of these upgrades, I don't care, especially not in the exact moment when I'm about to relax and put on an album), I hope they'll have fixed this. I really loathe how the streaming services don't allow me to customize my UX in any way. Especially when it's harder to find albums in their clients than in a shelf of CDs. From what I can tell from random Google Music screenshots, it's also oriented around the "grid of enormous pictures" paradigm. :(

criley2 11y ago
In Spotify, instead of "saving album to My Music" I choose to create a playlist of the album. It's just drag and drop to create the playlist on desktop. I choose to sort those into folders based on genre/artist/album, which works well for me.
- mbrock 11y ago
  Oh yeah, I have some of those old playlists cluttering up my sidebar... Wow, I didn't know there were folders! Thanks, that might work for me too.

gldnspud 11y ago

Too bad the now-defunct Rdio button on my Roku remote can't be remapped.

jeremyrwelch 11y ago

Rdio made a mistake by trying to compete directly with Spotify. And Pandora is making a huge mistake by shutting down the service and losing a valuable niche group of users. Everyone I know who actually uses Rdio is DIE HARD (I see evidence of this in the comments too). The users I know are pro audio guys, musicians, programmers, artists, etc who use the app 6+ hours a day across desktop and mobile. Rdio could easily carve out a dedicated customer base at the high-end who would pay MUCH MORE for a Pro version (I'd do $50 a month).

tallerholler 11y ago
ever since I discovered rdio a year or so ago I am always telling friends etc.. I think their UI is superior and the experience is just better than e.g. pandora imo...
- jeremyrwelch 11y ago
  Exactly. I've recruited at least 4 friends to use the service. How many hours a day would you estimate you use it?
  - viiralvx 11y ago
    I constantly use the service. I download songs to listen to offline while driving, streaming albums / playlists while coding, and if I'm at home and chilling, I normally have the Rdio Roku app playing music while I'm cooking or keep my laptop on and connected to Bluetooth while remote controlling it from my phone (phone notifications over Bluetooth audio get annoying). It's an amazing service and I'm really sad to see it go. :/
  - tallerholler 11y ago
    I listen to it on and off all day at work most days...
fredkbloggs 11y ago
Such is the way of the world. 50,000 customers willing to pay $50 a month aren't worth the trouble, especially if they're even slightly demanding. Everyone wants the 50 million users willing to put up with ads that bring in $3 a month or are willing to pay $5 or $10.

bananaoomarang 11y ago

Honestly, if Spotify had a redesign I don’t think there’d be another choice.

jonah 11y ago

Super bummed. I've been a subscriber from the very beginning. Loved their interfaces and service far more than any of the alternatives. (Though these days 90% of my Rdio listening is through Sonos, but still it worked great.) You'll be missed.

hobo_mark 11y ago

Ctrl+F Soundcloud.. crickets I once made a chrome extension to add global keyboard shortcuts to Soundcloud and now that is literally all I listen to all day (I know, artists aren't getting a penny from me and that is bad, especially for small indies, I would buy much more music off bandcamp if the ux wasn't so atrocious). My point is, surely I'm not the only one here using SC exclusively? Just curious.

theGimp 11y ago
Re: global keyboard shortcuts. I found https://github.com/msfeldstein/chrome-media-keys https://github.com/msfeldstein/chrome-media-keys a while back. It's amazing. It's not flawless, but it adds global controls to most websites.
slouch 11y ago
Just yesterday, I tried to find an album that Scott Melker had uploaded to SoundCloud. It's gone, and he posted this announcement https://soundcloud.com/scottmelker/please-listen-a-message-on-my-soundcloud-takedowns-and-account https://soundcloud.com/scottmelker/please-listen-a-message-o... So, SoundCloud can't present me with the discography of Black Sabbath, and a smaller artist I enjoy can't even keep his music on the service.
Wingman4l7 11y ago
The problem with Soundcloud is that the freely available "preview" versions are 128 kbps transcodes,[1] which is pretty mediocre quality (and possibly worse, if the source was lossy to begin with). [1]: http://uploadandmanage.help.soundcloud.com/customer/portal/articles/2162441-uploading-requirements http://uploadandmanage.help.soundcloud.com/customer/portal/a...

jacquesm 11y ago

What assets do they have worth $75M?

antidaily 11y ago
75,000 Aeron chairs.

rekoros 11y ago

I was one of Rdio's first employees (3rd) and have been a happy subscriber since Craig got billing to work. After FB employees got free Rdio, they gave Rdio employees free Rdio as well, but I kept paying—to retain the right to bitch. (I got a free account for my wife though.) My entire extended family have been paying for and swearing by Rdio for years. I was introduced to Erlang at Rdio (this shaped the future of my career) and worked on the original implementation of the Heavy Rotation feature. I walked around the office asking people "Does this look right? How about this?" I'd upgrade Erlang code in production by hot-reloading the heavy rotation module, and walk around some more. It was fun! In 2011, I realized that Rdio will never succeed due to lack of fanatical leadership—you can't have a company with absent founders, that's just not how it works—and left. I've been expecting this sort of an "exit" for a while. Today I work at my own startup (sameroom.io) and every single day I'm grateful for the Rdio experience—mostly as a cautionary tale, unfortunately. And now, we have to deal with this: "Are we really going to start using Spotify after so many years of hating on it?" —our 15-year-old.

mbesto 11y ago
> "Are we really going to start using Spotify after so many years of hating on it?" —our 15-year-old. Genuinely curious here - why are so many techies desperately passionate (both positive and negative) about choice of unseemly unnecessary tech products? I feel like there is this peculiar subculture of tech-minded folk who defend at odds their tech choices. "Slack is the best" "Hell no, IRC has been around for years!" "Let's fight!" I don't see any rational reason to "hate" on the success of a company or a brand...
- willtheperson 11y ago
  "I chose X so to validate my choice I will tell you why Z is the worst!" It happens everywhere. Some get more caught up in it (Video Game console, iPhone / Galaxy, etc.). Marketing tries to play into this a bit for free promotion. Make you feel intelligent for choosing them and you're part of a club so you'll spread their gospel.
- epa 11y ago
  The tech generation grew up in a 'free' culture of internet: illegal downloads, open source, pro bono collaboration. Paying for something that is equally equivalent to something that was free for decades usually is a tough sell. This doesnt apply to all people.

dioltas 11y ago

And I just switched from Spotify to rdio. What timing!

bndw 11y ago

Sad to hear this- I've been a paying Rdio customer for a few years now and have been thrilled with the service overall. Given the alternatives, I'll likely attempt purchasing albums from Amazon, or another DRM-free alternative.

bennesvig 11y ago

I've been a paying subscriber of Rdio for at least 3+ years. I loved that Rdio let me explore other people's playlists, often leading to discover new favorite songs. Also never liked Spotify's UI. I'm bummed to switch.

badmadrad 11y ago

I just checked out Youtube Music today and its pretty awesome and you are able to leverage all the great catalog of music uploaded to Youtube. I'm surprised more people are not using it/talking about it. I really do see this as a spotify killer if its gets some steam and some of the discovery features you get with spotify.

Wingman4l7 11y ago
If Youtube Music Key is not drawing directly from curated uploads from artists, it's going to be an opaque mess of poor quality lossy uploads.

verelo 11y ago

This has been an interesting 5 years for this space. I had Grooveshark, but they didn't have an iOS app, so when i switched from Android I went to Rdio. When Spotify launched in Canada, I tried it, and quickly switched over simply because the app was not complete junk. The Rdio song offering was fine, just as good as Spotify as far as I could tell. The Rdio app, was terrible. 50% of the time it would "play" but no sound would come out, the other 50% it would sometimes work / sometimes just crash or lock up. You cannot have a product that is half assed, when you are still trying to win the market, and even if you have won you still cant for very long.

tibbydude 11y ago

Looks like we are going to switch over the kids to Apple Music for Android when it is stable enough. Rdio was at least available in South Africa unlike Google Play Music and Spotify.

Qantourisc 11y ago

Thinking of going back to buying CD's (or getting Flac files). Streaming services are to unreliable :/ They are only good for discovery.

yason 11y ago
It takes a lot of trust to lose a lot of trust. First there were records, then cassettes, then compact discs, and they all wore out. A plausible lifetime for something you bought was maybe 15-20 years: not really a problem but indeed a nuisance. You knew the day would come when the cassette would snap or the CD would just jump way too much. Moving to digital music was the big revolution. I could encode songs into files on my computer and I could replicate those literally forever. I would never, ever lose my music again, or be forced to buy it back in the de facto format of the next decade. Then came the streaming services. That meant convenience but it did trade in even worse life expectancy and uncertainty. Anyone could bet money that a digital streaming service in the 2000's would not be around 20 years later. But they did become popular, especially when mobile 3G/4G data appeared everywhere. Ironically, while it did become possible to stream anything anywhere, you could also fit all your audio files onto a memory card. Several times. At a negligible cost. Surely you would only have your own collection with you, but that collection was actually hundreds or thousands of compact discs all compressed into a manageable amount of data. For reference, I still have my music in ogg/mp3 format and digitally bought albums as flac. I didn't have plans to move away from that and I still don't. If I want my music in a new phone or in my car, I'll just replicate my collection to a new device or memory card. And I then have the exactly same collection on my phone that I have on my desktop. And my work computer. I still have my 80's-90's CDs in the closet but I've ripped the most important albums no later than the turn of the millennium, at the latest. The setup is so manageable and dirt cheap that I can't but wonder what would it take to replace it.

mkent 11y ago

I've put together my own simple rdio -> Google play music migration: https://gist.github.com/mdkent/9d48a4142362a2815b09 https://gist.github.com/mdkent/9d48a4142362a2815b09

_djo_ 11y ago

This is really disappointing, Rdio was one of the few music streaming services legally available in South Africa. It's pretty much just Deezer and Apple Music left now. Google Play Music, Pandora and Spotify are all region-locked.

wobbleblob 11y ago

Ahh, Pandora. They were ahead of their time at one time. Then suddenly and without warning, they kicked me out. "We don't want your filthy money, foreign scum. English speaking countries only!" Yes, I know how proxies and VPNs work, but I'm not going to spend money and break the terms of service just to trick a company into accepting my money. If they don't want to do business with me, then so be it. Spotify's recommendation algorithm isn't as good (ooh, you liked a song in Russian? that must mean you only want to hear Russian bands from now on, right?), but they don't think I'm too foreign for them.

kyrre 11y ago
isn't this due to complex licensing issues? i created my original rdio account while living in London, and then when i moved to Norway i decided to upgrade my subscription, at which point my playlists became unplayable as a large portion of songs were suddenly marked as "unavailable" in my region
- wobbleblob 11y ago
  Spotify seems to have found a solution for these complex licensing issues. Netflix allows me to pay them money, but they have a different selection available depending on where I'm connecting from. Initially, Pandora gave the impression that they were working on it, but how long has it been, 10 years? They can go sit on the roof with a bunch of onions as far as I'm concerned.
  - kyrre 11y ago
    yeah, that's a fair point i guess

Grue3 11y ago

This is what will happen to every single streaming service eventually. It's hard to believe that 10 years down the line Apple Music, or Spotify, or Google whatever-it's-called-now will still be a thing. If you really like listening to music, make sure you either have it as physical media, or stored on your hard drive (yes, I still buy and rip CDs myself).