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

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

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374 pointsMarlonPro254 comments

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.

> "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...

"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.

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.

This probably also explains why it's so hard to find a good editor. So many devs are totally unwilling to pay a decent amount for anything. Maybe the exception being hosting. Outside of hosting a server and dns and an SSL cert, it's hard to get engineers making 6 figures to spend more than $50 on a tool they use every day of their working life.

Intellij recently switched to a new plan that adds up to like $15 to $10 a month for all their awesome (but very specialized) IDEs and people are going nuts over how much that is. It's nothing. But devs want to pay for very little. So we get shitty tools. Like vim[1] or atom[2]. Thanks I guess. Seriously can I have a generic text editor that's as good at editing as IntelliJ is at Java?

[1] http://geoff.greer.fm/vim/

[2] https://news.floobits.com/2015/10/14/developing-atom-plugins...

ReSharper has been worth every penny that I've given them over the years for upgrades.

Seriously, it amounts to one or two days' worth of salary for a software engineer. The break-even point is extremely low.

> it's hard to get engineers making 6 figures to spend more than $50 on a tool they use every day of their working life.

On the flip-side, why invest all of your time become accustomed (possibly married) to an ecosystem that is beholden to someone else? Just because you spend $100 on VisualStudio doesn't mean that MS will take your input to heart when some manager "on high" decides to change direction with the product.

Depends on what are the alternatives: if there is an open alternative with the same features for free then sure use it, but if there is no alternative with the features you need then you have to invest your time/money to build that feature and very likely it's more time/money than to buy and learn an ecosystem.

If developers are currently using the OpenSource solutions, then they probably work for those people. Who are "you" to question what works for them and what features are a priority to them?

Many developers pay for close-source editors and IDEs, and the companies that support/develop them aren't necessarily going under. Heck BBEdit is still around despite falling out of favour as the de facto MacOS editor years ago.

Just within the Python ecosystem there are 2 or 3 IDEs that cater to Python developers despite the number of Python developers that prefer Vi(m) or Emacs.

The idea that developers don't or won't pay for an editor or that the OpenSource/Free alternatives are the equivalent of developers coding in Notepad on Windows just for save a few bucks is a false premise.

I disliked the IntelliJ move because I have a preference for owning over renting. Possibly because I grew up in a country with a preference for owning property and seeing rent as dead money, or because I grew up buying and collecting CDs and putting them into alphabetical order.

In this case, I am happy to pay for RubyMine. And happy to pay a little more if I want to update to the latest version. But I don't like the idea of only being able to use it this month as long as I've paid the rent.

> it's hard to get engineers making 6 figures to spend more than $50 on a tool they use every day of their working life

I paid JetBrains $100, because their IDE is awesome, and worth every penny. $100 is probably worth more to me since I am third-worlder[1], I earn far less than 6 figures.

>Intellij recently switched to a new plan that adds up to like $15 to $10 a month for all their awesome (but very specialized) IDEs and people are going nuts over how much that is

No - it wasn't about the money for me; I was one of the very vocal critics about that[2]. The subscription was actually worked out cheaper per year! My complaint was that once you stopped paying subscriptions, your IDE would stop working (they have since backtracked). Previously, if your licence expired, you'd be left with a working IDE which you can no longer upgrade/get updates for, but working nonetheless.

It also didn't help that I felt personally betrayed by the decision after recommending JB to my colleagues and coworkers for years.

1. Middle class third-worlder, but $100 is a larger percentage of my income vs. first-wolrd

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10171551

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...

Well, in the case of Rdio vs Spotify, Rdio is way better, UI-wise.

But that has nothing to do with our 15-y-o — she grew up with Rdio and it's the only streaming music service she's ever known.

It all goes back to Emacs vs VI.

As a dev, if you are tool-agnostic, then you're also productivity-agnostic.

You have to keep in mind that this is a kind of game. Almost no one truly, really hates the other product. People don't get into fistfights over Vim vs. Emacs. It's just a community joke.

So for instance I'm in the IRC camp of group communication, and I'll go to great length to use it over Slack, but if you really need me to use Slack and it makes sense, then I'll use Slack. But I will be doing cynical jokes so that you won't forget I'm in the other camp :P.

>People don't get into fistfights over Vim vs. Emacs. It's just a community joke.

Unfortunately, this can get out of hand, see systemd death threats. Hope people will learn to be nicer on the internet now that the general population is on it.

That's not a product rivalry, that's a deeper upset with how systemd is handling things.

Nobody thinks vim is trying to take over the editor space.

But I would hope you'd still think that death threats over it are utterly ridiculous, and unacceptable?

Yes.

People do get into fistfights over sporting rivalries, though, not to mention religious ones.

I know. I just haven't seen this dynamic go that far in the tech sector yet.

I actually had a real-deal power struggle with an employee once about using hipchat instead of IRC. They refused to use hipchat, then left the company eventually. So it's not a game for everyone.

It is basic human nature to polarise into distinct communities and take sides. Look at football teams. They wear different colours, have minor differences in ethoses but both play more or less the same game of football. Slack versus IRC is the same concept.

Tribalism is human nature. It's not rational. In a tribe, being rejected is pretty much a death sentence, so I can see why humans have a strong motivation to be in one. It turns irrational when that tribe is coke vs pepsi, xbox vs playstation, vim vs emacs, etc.

Techies are generally idealist and strongly opinionated about stuff they think they know best.

Speaking to the question you posed at the end: Having worked at Grooveshark I think Google Music is the obvious choice now that Rdio will soon be gone.

I had Google Music for 6 months and, while their music selection is great, their UI is horrendous.

For example if I'm scrolling through an artists albums, they would list every release of an album (European release, NA release, Japan release, extended version, radio friendly, non-radio friendly). Maybe that's nice for some? It was just a hassle for me.

Overall navigation through the app I found to be really, really bad.

I've never noticed that myself, but if you say it's a feature, I'll believe you, and applaud Google for doing it that way.

As different album releases often contain different recordings, sometimes finding EXACTLY the song I want to hear is hard to do. Having fallen for Sublime when they were still playing live shows, but knowing that they were only able to capitalize on their fame after the death of their singer, they've (necessarily) released a bunch of versions of old songs, which are often vastly different from one another. Finding JUST the right recording of a particular song is only enabled by having that otherwise needless duplication in the selection process, and I'm certainly willing to endure that if it means being able to add every version of X to my queue to find just the one I was looking for.

Offtopic, if they could only add Whitesnake's "Starkers in Tokyo" recording, I'd have just the right version of "Here I Go Again" in my library.

On the other hand, some people don't care about the several slightly different recordings or remixes of "Santeria" and just want to listen to Sublime? A good UI would allow for both rather than just point the firehose of information at the user.

The downside being that the duplicate detection is nonexistent - I have a playlist I sync to my phone, and often when I'm listening on "I'm Feeling Lucky" mode at my PC a song will come up that I like and I'll add it to the playlist. As you can imagine, this often leads to multiple versions of the same song taking up valuable space. The same goes for thumbs-up and thumbs-down - it won't apply to all versions of a song. Which is fair enough when they're actually different (live, remastered, remixed or whatever) but when we're talking about the European release, NA release and Japan release of the same album it's often literally exactly the same recording.

Trouble is, I can't come up with a "best of both worlds" fix that allows both (perfectly valid) use cases.

MusicBrainz has separate concepts of "works", "recordings" and "releases" that I think should allow for some resolution of your problems. I'm not aware of any tooling that actually makes use of this level of data though -- anyone more familiar than me?

Having every version is good.

Listing them equivalently with no subcategorization makes navigation a huge pain.

> 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

Can you elaborate on this? How was the leadership absent? and why do you think that was?

Rdio co-founders sold Skype (twice). When they co-founded Rdio, they weren't hoping to build their life's work, they just wanted to try something new (I guess), in the US. Rdio was run by VPs.

That's OK when things are going great and there's lots of money in the bank. It's not OK when the ship needs some founder-inspired steering in a storm. It's not OK when the ship is taking on water. It's not OK if there are signs of mutiny. It's not OK if pirates are about to board.

And it so happens that most startups tend to spend their lives navigating rough waters with not enough money in the bank and pirates in tow.

Did you have trouble hiring, given the bad rep the founders got when they fired some employees at Skype and pulled back their vested options? [1]

[1]: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/26/skypes-worthless-employee-s...

When that news came out I personally became very aware of the absence of a real "Skype mafia", a la PayPal. It might be the old vs new world thing.

I don't know for sure, but I don't think Rdio had any trouble hiring, ever, because it is(was) a service that people love(d).

Do you think lack of founder attention negatively impacted lack of progress on the partnership/BD side? Seem to be key in the market (Spotify with Starbucks; Pandora in-car app).

Sad to see the "best" product in the market go under.

Absolutely.

Rdio had insane product talent but no business captain (this can only be an obsessed founder, pre-success).

With normal startups, they just fail off the bat in this scenario.

Rdio had enough money to hide the lack of captain issue for a really long time.

Offtopic, but thank you for starting (and linking to) sameroom.

I just started noodling around with some code last week to bridge the messaging gap within my own company (we're supposed to use Lync, or Skype, or whatever it's called now, but nobody does because we've all used it), so we have a mish mash of users on a variety of networks, and I'm looking forward to using sameroom, and hopefully, get to abandon the code I was working on.

You're welcome! Let me know if you need any help with the setup.

We're likely to build something that works with S4B (Lync) soon. Working on a Jabber bridge now, which is similar, deployment-wise.

thanks for making sameroom.io, it's great irc -> slack & slack -> irc in less than a minute or two!

It's still unfortunate because this easily the best product in the market. They cared deeply about the experience...

Vdio was a terrible decision though.

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

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.

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.

Any chance we'll get to see the cap table now that Rdio is being liquidated?

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/, which he is working on with another early Rdio employee.

As little as I actually count on the service, and have yet to update my files with tracks since about 2013, Radio Reddit is one of the few I know of that legitimately side-steps the licensing issue. It's more of a discovery service than streaming service, so to speak. Niche market.

Heck, if ReverbNation or BandCamp wanted to get into the 'stand-alone, broadcast/streaming, exposure and small payment per play' market, they could have a distinct advantage in that their content sources are, predominately, unsigned and able to negotiate in good faith (in theory). Could be a great way for new bands to get noticed...could also be an unlistenable mess of garbage without human curation. Sort of a counter-community to SoundCloud, which I see as more of dealing with label pressures in ways ReverbNation/BandCamp would avoid.

>Heck, if ReverbNation or BandCamp wanted to get into the 'stand-alone, broadcast/streaming, exposure and small payment per play' market, they could have a distinct advantage in that their content sources are, predominately, unsigned and able to negotiate in good faith (in theory).

Yeah, but also the very big disadvantage that nobody cares for those artists [1], even for the better ones among them.

This kind of "long tail" [2] idea never panned out, because it turns out most people mostly go for the few acts at the top -- and, heck, even those today are not doing very well, sales and streaming licenses wise.

[1] Using "nobody" as an emphasized "very few".

[2] Referring to this Friedman/Gladwelian notion that the long tail is big enough to be profitable, as in: http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html

Maybe nobody cares yet because nobody has made a sufficiently compelling alternative.

Almost everyone I know has at least some bands they like that aren't one of the few acts at the top. Local bands, side projects, anti-establishment punk bands, whatever.

My little working class town is a miniature hotbed for small bands. They don't all make weird punk or whatever, tons of them make music that would be really nice for café ambience.

But from visiting cafés around here, it does seem like the only music that exists is the repeating top 20. I don't think anyone actually likes this, though. I certainly don't.

Somebody could make it fun and easy for cafés and friends and whoever to play that music. That would have a very real value.

ReverbNation would need a lot of curation on top their rewards-for-uploads model to make it listenable. Unlimited skips wouldn't be enough for the early adopters to enjoy the stream.

I was thinking about this a little more and realized that ReverbNation already has a "pay-for-listens" model where artists/bands have to fork over cash to have 'a community' review tracks and give a rating on a 0-10 scale. If a song hits higher than 8, it's allowed to submit to big name outlets (CBS Radio, etc) through their platform. So, I think it's kind of a flipped model - the people who listen to ReverbNation as a curation function are, more than likely, paid to sit there and go through the submissions.

Fair points and I can see your perspective, but also think you're kind of too focused on the notion of streaming revenue as the goal for unsigned bands/musicians/artists. Even signed to a major label, the income is negligible.

However in other avenues, such as 'music review' and licensing for film/commercials, there's a genuine thirst for finding the "next big thing" and getting involved with the artist before the 'long tail' even gets started. My favorite example is Chvrches, which turned free publicity into a viable career. Yes, there are only a few at the top who have the quality and capability, but that's kind of the point of curation, review, and promotions teams - if they don't find something new, somebody else will.

Remember all that buzz around whichever indie/unknown group was featured in an Apple commercial? That's more what I'm talking about, because they probably made more from the commercial and initial sales bump than they ever will/would from streaming revenue, and that's just the nature of the business. Hot today, cold tomorrow, better make something new to stay in the game.

I agree with you about Google Music. For those lucky enough to sign up early and get the $7.99 price, it is easily the best pay for streaming service out there.

Best is subjective. Google Music is definitely a great music store.

For those wanting a social music experience Spotify is the "best".

For those wanting curated music and a digital radio experience Apple Music is the "best".

For those wanting a hands off service Pandora is the "best".

This.

I find Google Music has better playlist and radio functionality than all others - probably because of the songza acquisition.

I've used Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, Xbox Music (Now Groove Music), and I find Google Music's recommendation engine by far the best. They even have a "I'm feeling lucky" feature that plays a set of curated music to your interest randomly.

This make a lot of sense to me. Every time this discussion comes up, I'm stuck wondering what the hubbub is, since I've never wanted for anything more than Pandora. In fact, Pandora is perfect for me, since I very specifically do not want to curate my music at all beyond choosing a song, artist or genre and letting it pick stuff I might like. Letting me thumbs up/down stuff to get it better to my tastes is just gravy.

I sure as hell don't want to actively pursue and catalogue music new to me, that just sounds tedious.

Check out Songza if you haven't already. Curated pre-defined stations by genre takes things even a step further than Pandora as far as not wanting to manually curate.

I find it the "easiest" music app to use because you just pick a channel and go.

It was purchased by Google a few years ago.

The last two points are extremely debatable.

I have used Google, Spotify, and Pandora, and in my experience, Google's hands-off auto-generated playlists are extremely high quality. They also have great radio/curated playlists via the Songza acquisition.

Spotify is a clear winner for a social experience, but I think you're really underestimating Google on the other dimensions.

I don't know about debatable so far as Apple's advantage.

They have radio stations by Dr Dre, Drake, Joshua Homme and countless other musical figures. Not to mention operating Beats 1 24/7 in London, NY, LA. It's pretty impressive (if that's what you're into).

Coming from Rdio, I'm genuinely curious where you find the social experience in Spotify. Is it all in FB?

In Rdio I really enjoy the comments feature and how generally constructive it tends to be. In addition it's easy to find people with similar musical tastes in the list of recent listeners - I've followed people via this mechanism and found great music as a result. I don't see how to do the same in Spotify at all. Spotify shows me that 300k people listened to a band, with 18k new listeners today, but no individual link to any of them? And none of them can comment, post reviews, or link to music videos or trivia? Where's the user generated/curated content?

Granted I haven't used Spotify in a few years so it may just take me some time to find all of the things that are immediately at hand in Rdio in Spotify's (imo less friendly) UI.

RIP Rdio :(

Man I took the ability to follow people based on musical tastes for granted - I spent so much time looking for people all over the world who were listening to interesting stuff and ever morning I download a few albums I found on the Trending page.

I'm just lost with Spotify and Google music, I go there and see pictures of Justin Bieber and I don't know what to do. Apple Music is a little better but it's a totally different approach, being told what's good by record labels and "tastemakers".

The way Rdio did it just seemed natural, like going over to someone's house and checking out their record collection. I almost think the others are avoiding letting you see who is listening to what so they and the labels can push more Beiber stuff.

I agree with your take on social with Rdio & Spotify. Rdio was the strongest in this category. Still, Rdio could have done more to emphasis finding your music "friend" - someone who has the similar preferences. It was the differentiator.

It's interesting that the music studios are pushing for consolidation in the streaming audio market. Even if they do own a piece of the companies it seems like that could come back to bite them in the future.

I really like spotify because I can use it on my phone, PS3, laptop, etc. My phone can be the remote to my sound system in another room.

I also have a small data plan on my phone so I do not stream music. Spotify allows me to download their songs for playing offline.

Does Google Music provide these or similar?

(i also prefer spotify)

google music also allows you to remote stream music, as long as it has a chromecast plugged in (there's no support outside that afaik)

it also allows you to download music

you can use on your phone and laptop, but i don't think there's console support right now.

You can also cast to anything by Sonos, though it's a bit buggier.

I use Google music, mostly because I got in on it early and get it at small discount for $7.99/mo.

I use it on my phone, in my car (via bluetooth from my phone home stereo (via bluetooth from my phone), television (via chromecast from my phone), and laptop (via the web).

It also allows me to upload my offline library, which was unique when it came out (I think?) but isn't so much now (right?).

My wife has Spotify, and she uses it the exact same way. Eventually we'll decide on one based on something trivial (like me being willing to switch, and she being not willing) and do a family account. And once we do, that will be that until the service closes or changes drastically. The services aren't that much different.

No uploading your offline library was not unique when it came out nor unique now. Initially Apple's implementation was much better since it fingerprinted the song and linked it to their library so you only had to upload songs not in their library.

And actually the services are quite different if you spend a lot of time with them. I switched from Spotify to Apple Music and now considering buying both.

Google Music has definitely used fingerprinting for some time - I think from its inception. I haven't used Spotify for a long time, so I'm not sure how it works.

Spotify does not allow you to upload your music or anything like that. You simply have access to their full catalog, and can choose to download any part of it for offline consumption.

This is false, this feature definitely exists.

Correction: A local spotify install can find music on your computer which can be played through the spotify client, but you cannot UPLOAD this music for use on other clients.

The Spotify desktop client can act as a Media Player for your other media, but you cannot upload it like you can with other services (which would be pointless, seeing as you already have access to 100% of Spotify's catalog).

Yes, GPM has supported fingerprinting for a really long time.

But absolutely not from inception. iTunes Match had about a six month lead on that. It was a major differentiator at the time.

Spotify also has a native(-ish) OSX client (can you use Google Music outside the browser?) and excellent playlist drag/drop and sharing support. Plus, I love their iOS user interface. No other service has come close in either area.

I just wish they had better local file support.

Forget the "-ish". Actually, forget the "native". Their app is no more or less native than Rdio's was.

You have to use 3rd party apps to get Google Music outside the browser, but it's still essentially just using the regular web page with the addition of being able to use the media keys.

You can use the media keys with Google Play Music in a browser, at least in Chrome. No third-party app required.

I could be wrong, but I don't think those work globally (without an addon). Or has that changed recently?

It requires a bundled by default, Google Music app. If you disable or delete it, the media keys will stop working. Here is the download link for the app :

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-play-music/...

I use gear music player for google music https://www.gearmusicplayer.com/. It's fantastic (but not free).

What an incredible app. Just bought it!

A couple of years ago Spotify rewrote their clients to use CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework), so since then their clients are in some sense native and in some sense not, and much more consistent across platforms.

Anyway, I agree with you that they have been pushing the envelope in terms of mobile functionality, especially iOS. Lately I'm not happy with how Android has crippled their lock screen experience by screwing up the lock screen widget API - but that's not Spotify's fault.

To any Spotify skeptics, I highly recommend trying the premium service. The social feed, cross-device sync, BPM matching for runners, collaborative playlists, Spotify Connect (ability to switch and control music playing on another device), Algoriddm Djay integration, all changed the way I experience music. Their radio/suggestions engine is not as good as Pandora's, but is slowly improving. The only thing that is sort of a letdown is the visualizations API, but I can see why it's not a priority.

> A couple of years ago Spotify rewrote their clients to use CEF

Eh. And not to sound like a cranky old man, but that shit sucks.

It's ridiculous that their "app" needs 20-30 seconds to boot on a modern computer. It's a damned music player. Plus, when the machine is under load, it skips like a 1993 disc player. And the damned thing crashes routinely.

Pre-CEF I was terribly impressed by their mac client. It's been a pretty ugly cliff they've fallen off though. They did a developer blog post some time ago detailing how teams are all using separate JS routines and libs... and I have to say, I wasn't surprised. It's rare that a popular app regresses in performance and usability quite as much as they have.

It takes roughly 2.5 seconds to load on my machine, not sure what's happening on yours that means it takes 20-30 seconds.

That's still 5-10x slower than it should be.

Google's UI is, as always, horrendous. Big fan of Spotify as well.

And they just added this awesome jogging feature that finds songs that match a specific BPM.

I was also interested in whether Google Music supported offline music playing since I have rdio and rely on that feature. It looks like it does: https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/1250232?hl=en

I thought something similar about XBox Music, I figured with Microsoft's money it would never go away and it would have at least as good a selection of music as other music only services. I am right on the former, wrong on the latter. When I gave Spotify a shot I found they had a larger catalog of songs than XBox Music (particularly indie bands).

I guess it comes down to XBox Music is probably a loss leader or at least a runt service that doesn't get much love at MS but at Spotify, it's their ONLY business. Maybe Google is different than MS as far as how much attention they put into their music licensing (and there is the added YouTube benefit you mentioned) but it's something to consider (or at least really compare catalog access).

For indie bands, it's not so much Spotify's efforts as the bands' effort themselves that has gotten them on Spotify. If you're an indie band, you're going to take the effort to make sure that your music is showing up correctly on iTunes, Spotify, and other popular services.

I wonder if Google or Apple is in a stronger position to compete on price, and if either of them can accomplish what Amazon tried to accomplish with books until the Hatchette dispute.

Your people in the know are wrong. The labels own a very small part of e.g. Spotify - around 5% - and the rest is VC and the founders. Deezer's IPO documents were clear on where the ownership of that service lies.

Sadly the edit window has passed for that comment. Apologies for spreading old/erroneous information.

I read it more like, because the music startups are so dependent on the licenses they are practically owned by the music industry ( though not technically) which I thought was kinda insightful.

But I guess you meant litterally.

But royalty payments are far more than 5%.

It's not that the labels own Spotify -- it's that by issuing limited-term licensing deals, and owning all of the music, they'll be able to charge whatever they want for their music, leaving just a little bit on the table to keep Spotify in business. Spotify reports $100m in profit? Just raise licensing fees by $90m at the next contract. Spotify won't have the leverage to walk away.

Similar to Netflix, Spotify will need to create some reason for consumers to stay with Spotify, likely with some kind of music or music experience that is Spotify-exclusive like Netflix-exclusive TV shows. Also, Spotify has invested a lot of effort into its curated playlists -- this is an attempt to get people to listen to Spotify the way they watch Netflix -- fire it up and watch/listen to "whatever's on," instead of searching Taylor Swift and getting angry when they can't find it.

For every $1,000 in music sold the artist gets average musician gets $23.40 https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml

This doesn't mean that the studios are leaving a big cut to Spotify, it just means that the artists aren't getting much.

The article explains that Spotify's cut would be tiny.

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).

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...

Exactly. I've recruited at least 4 friends to use the service. How many hours a day would you estimate you use it?

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. :/

I listen to it on and off all day at work most days...

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.

Exactly. As if the only conceivable profitable business is a one-size-fits-all mono-culture product.

In fairness, it's probably the only way to get the coveted billion-dollar valuation. If that's your metric for success rather than operating margins or return on shareholders' equity, you don't really have much of a choice. A small company could serve those 50,000 very well and make its founders and investors quite rich, but very few people want to run a small company. It's all about getting to $1 billion and either selling out huge or going public. That status is more important to almost everyone than actually making money or creating something people like. So enjoy your Apple Music and your Pandora!

Yeah, I just switched to rdio and I love it. The interface is so clean and slick. It's a lot less buggy / unreliable than Spotify imo. It's such a pity.

Strange. I was the biggest Rdio advocate until it just flat out didn't work on my MacBook. Tried uninstalling and reinstalling with no luck. Support couldn't do much for me. I ended up moving to Spotify and while I agree that Rdio has a superior UI, Spotify worked consistently on my machine. Plus, their mobile app, especially offline playback, is a godsend on long trips.

The UI is the best since gasp Winamp. But their networking was terrible. I could never use the app while traveling abroad plus the Mobile streaming was useless to say the least. Yes, I'm an audio purist, but I don't mind sacrificing quality for the convenience of not listening to listening to regular radio payola.

It's sad, a simple buffer implementation would have kept me as a customer, but looks like they focused more on failed Video platforms (did anyone ever use Vdio?)

I love you rdio!!! Spotify sucks don't go!!!

Die hard audio people using the desktop application surely must have been turned off by the fact that the desktop application could not even do gapless playback, even after years of subscribers begging for it over their forums.

In my experience the Android application, while able to do gapless, was not able to consistently _stay logged in and play music_. Or feed back track identity through bluetooth devices to cars and the Pebble.

The only "improvements" made to either the desktop or the mobile application seemed to be about making it harder to see or filter which songs you had added to your Favourites.

I wanted it to work out, but it became so frustrating that I gave up a bit under a year ago and went back to Spotify.

This is my impression too - and as a rdio subscriber myself, I also have annecdotal evidence: I maintain a huge offline library of losslessly bought music and that will never be replaced by a streamign service. Still, I love rdio as a preview, discovery and social hub - the people I interacted with there are all very similar: Audiophiles, with deep knowledge about music, digital crate diggers. Most, including me, still buy everything they like. Rdio has always been the service for true music enthusiasts in my mind and, frankly, I don't know where to go from here - I tried most other services at some point and have been pretty disappointed with their superficial approach to discovery and social features.

Just now I tried Spotify again and I don't like it all: No album focus, no label focus. Social features via Facebook? Meh.

Amen^10

I agree that it seems like a big misstep to discontinue the service so quickly. Given their relative size, there have to be hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers, and an order of magnitude more Free subscribers that are dedicated Rdio customers. That's significant. Why inspire all those people to go away and risk them getting attached to another competing service? Why not simply re-brand Rdio as Pandora for the time being?

I understand that there are costs associated with maintaining the Rdio application back-end; all the API services the clients use, databases, content delivery network, media storage, new music ingestion, royalty payment system, the mobile, auto, TV and set-top apps etc. It costs a lot of dough just keeping the lights on.

But how much does it cost to a) keep the lights on for say 6 months to a year versus b) what, develop your own product and market the hell out of it so you can start from 0 paying subscribers and try to work your way back up to where Rdio was? (is what Pandora has in mind? Can't believe they just wanted to snuff the service.)

But somebody must have done the math and said "yep, makes sense, kill it." Either because they just wanted to flush Rdio out of the way or because the math comparison was a no-brainer.

In the meantime, I'm going to join you in continuing to enjoy the best, and most beautiful on-demand streaming service available.

(not sure about the comments regarding buggy mobile streaming. At 320 it may drop in the countryside, but dial it down to 192 or lower and you're fine. Yeah I like high grade audio too, but I prefer lower grade music to no music at all.)

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?

> I am also not sure if Apple music is useable without an iDevice.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...

http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/11/16/apple-music-review-i...

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?

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.andr...

Yeah... I have yet to accept the iTunes terms of service in the 2-ish years I've owned my latest macbook, and I don't plan to begin now. :)

Wow, how long has an Android Apple Music app been available?

I might have gone with Apple Music if I had known this a few months ago. With iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play music, it was a pain with duplicate music libraries.

I went with Play Music (now gets ad-free youtube thrown in), but I might have made a different decision.

> Wow, how long has an Android Apple Music app been available?

6 days. and, for everyone's surprise, it's quite good. fast too.

Some background on it here: http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/10/apple-music-comes-to-androi...

He's being a bit cute with the "little hamburger" remark, but I still chuckled. Better than invisible "swipe from edge" menus if you ask me.

If you still have an existing CD or MP3 collection, then uploading it to Google Play Music is a great option. From there you can use the ad-supported radio and buy albums/songs, or subscribe and get ad-free radio, ad-free YouTube, and all-access to most of the store catalog.

Play Music's web interface is very good, but I can't say whether you'd like it more or less than Rdio and Spotify.

Apple music is not usable with any device. Just to name a few issues I've personally experienced:

- Not being able to listen to music because itunes said I wasn't signed in. (of course I was and the only way to fix it was to restart my computer.) This error happens a few times per month.

- Songs not playing and getting an alert error with some random code that results in searching countless threads online. This happens multiple times per day.

- There's no way to get to an artist from a song...think about that. You can't click on the artists name or select it from the dropdown menu while a song is playing...So you have to search the song and then select the artists name in the search results.

- Absolutely no concept of syncing. Create a playlist on your computer and it might show up on your phone? Create one on your phone and edit it on your computer, but the changes don't reflect across devices. Everything just goes to shit.

- Extremely slow clunky UI. Click a button or link and wait 1-2 seconds for some random UI thing to pop up so you can do whatever it is you set out to do.

- Click any tab in the top navigation with the window set ot 50%0 of the screen and the UI will flutter quite a bit making you select a tab you didn't want to.

- Click on a playlist that apple made and get an error saying something like "This playlist is currently not available". This happens at least once per week.

...I could go on and on. The ONLY thing Apple music gets right is recommendations. IMO It is by far the worst piece of software Apple has ever release.

I have nothing to say about your other issues (I haven't experienced most of them; I'm quite happy with the service), but the banner at the top of the More (…) menu takes you to the album of a song, which then easily leads to the Artist page. Do it all the time, takes me half a second.

It's definitely buggy. It's a real shame too, because the service is actually awesome when it works. But tying it to iTunes on Windows and not spending nearly enough time hammering out the backend issues is killing it.

It's worth noting that most of your issues are related to the brutal experience that is iTunes for Windows. Not that's an excuse, just a heads up for those that may not share your experience.

I use Apple Music every day on my iPhone, Mac and work Windows 7 machine, and I experience every issue you list on Windows but not on the Mac or iPhone.

Your syncing issue could be related to not "upgrading" all of your devices to iCloud Music Library.

Apple Music's UI/UX is not only terrible it can prove deadly if used while driving. I know we shouldn't be messing with our music apps while driving but a good majority does.

Using Siri and Apple Music for the most part works like a charm and is helpful in terms of keeping one safe while driving/enjoying their music subscription app.

And yet it's still more useful to me than Spotify, which summarily stopped syncing new music to my phone after a few months (and, no, uninstall/reinstall did nothing to remedy it).

Apple Music's interface can be wonky, but the search bar is going to be %90 of the interface of any music app for me, so I can deal - most of the time I search with Siri and don't even look at it. And the "For Me" tab full of incredible curated playlists in genres of my choosing has introduced me to far more music than Spotify ever did.

I second this. I've been an extremely happy paid subscriber to Rdio for years. I generally listen to full albums on the desktop (at work), with a moderate bit of classical.

Rdio lets me find out about a specific musician/composer, then I get get to listen to a lot of their recorded output for free immediately, and repeat albums as much as I want.

RIP Rdio, you were awesome!

I'm a Canadian and have been a happy user of Deezer for several years: http://deezer.com

Have you looked at Spotify's classical music selection lately? Doing a rough tally, my playlists have over 6,000 classical songs on them, so I listen to a lot of classical, and something like 98% of what I look for is on Spotify, from early stuff all the way through modern classical.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

Totally agree. Spotify's weekly discover playlists have made me look forward to Mondays.

'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.

Catalog consistency was probably a licensing issue and not technological, I should point out. Same reason movies just disappear from Netflix every so often.

It absolutely was a licensing issue. But it results in a horrible experience for the end user.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

yeah, that's a fair point i guess

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Did they develop this in-house or acquire a technology for this?

Sounds like it was in house: http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/30/9416579/spotify-discover-w...

Frankly, that doesn't sound appealing at all as a discovery tool - unless I know I like the curator's taste, I'm probably not interested in his recommendations.

That's why the heavy rotation section in rdio that only showed popular music among your friends (which you should select carefully!) was so useful - if you had a circle of great tastemakers.

It's generated algorithmically based on your recent-ish listening habits combined with a bit of fairy dust, I believe they acquired a company that specialised in it.

It's pretty good at recommending songs to me that are similar to what i've been listening to, along with a few curveballs that encourage me to branch out, or throwbacks to older habits.

Very likely EchoNest. Used in rdio as well.

And while these algorithms work up to a degree at some point it's not useful anymore - especially if your taste is very specific and not dependent on obvious factors like genre or mood (I know, Echonest takes a lot more properties into account).

These days I see what feels like the same recommendations everywhere. Rdio solved this problem with good old fashioned human curation - and in contrast to Apple Music it's based on humans I want to follow, not some show host or editor that has to appeal to large crowds.

Right, I didn't word that very well. It's a computer generating the playlist, not a curator.

A shout out for 8tracks! I can search among human-curated playlists by themes/tags, and I often discover songs I like. 8tracks does the discovery part wonderfully for me. I mostly care more about the mood of the music rather than the exact songs, and that use-case is also served perfectly.

<3 8tracks. In practice, my girlfriend and I play 8tracks sets at home; we very commonly listen to the same set over and over.

Very commonly I'll find an artist I like with 8tracks, then switch to Rdio to listen to the rest of their catalog.

RIP Rdio, you were awesome!

If you're in US/Canada, give Slacker Radio a shot. They do radio "stations" better than anyone. Plus on-demand if you feel like just listening to an album or something.

Spotify has a habit of replaying songs that I have already thumbs downed as well as other songs by that same artist.

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)?

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-...

Someone else just pointed out Google Play Music as well. Apparently it works in the Browser without Flash?

Yes, no flash needed.

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

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-...

From being in the same position I've switched to soundcloud and mixcloud. They're not a true substitute in that they don't generally have the complete discography of artists as GS did, but they do have a decent chunk of it in mixes promos. On the other hand, both are better with respect to discovery, and mixcloud has something similar to user stations in that mixes are curated and tracklists are available (albeit in a silly manner[1]). Both are HTML5.

[1]: http://support.mixcloud.com/customer/portal/articles/1564645...

Google Play Music uses Media Source Extensions[1], so no Flash required.

https://w3c.github.io/media-source/

If you're willing to host it yourself, Plex has a web UI that doesn't require Flash and a set of mobile apps (that support syncing for offline playback). You're providing the content yourself, though.

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?

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.

just found this Chrome extension that allows you to export playlists https://twitter.com/frank_chimero/status/666373969394708481

There already is Spotify -> Rdio tools like http://resp.in/ Now we just need the reverse.

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 :(

I was just looking at this one:

https://github.com/jacobian/rdio2spotify

it worked!

Not what you asked for, but I wrote an Rdio to Google Music exporter a while back: https://github.com/rraval/rdio-gmusic

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.

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. :(

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.

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.

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

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.

Spotify has a web player as well

well, actually they have a web site with a Flash player.

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.

Here is Rdio's announcement of the shutdown:

http://blog.rdio.com/us/2015/11/important-news-from-rdio.htm...

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.

"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.

I'm 110% sure subscriber accounts are part of the 'Key Assets' Pandora bought from Rdio.

"...in the call today McAndrews made clear that those numbers [of users] are irrelevant since that service is shutting down, not transferring."

Rekt.

How does that indicate Pandora doesn't get the contact information and payment information of Rdio subscribers?

"not transferring"

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

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.

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

Might be related.

mute, not block. Rdio still gets paid.

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.

Based out of Oakland before it was cool

What did the employees get out of it?

Jobs?

Another Janus Friis company to add to the list.

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

How do you want it?

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/) 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.

Thanks!!

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Re: global keyboard shortcuts.

I found 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.

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-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.

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/a...

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

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.

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.

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

Interesting way to exit. Is that common?

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?

Shareholders get will nothing, but debt holders will still get paid in proportion of how much they're owed.

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.

VC investors typically holds convertible debt, so they are still in it if shareholders get wiped out, they may take a loss though. Tax payers should be fine, the Tax Man is in front of the queue.

Yup. It's failure.

To be less glib: when your company can't pay it's bills and can't get more investment you file for bankruptcy protection.

Yes, but where does the $75M end up? Wouldn't Chapter 11 be an end run around investors?

The $75 million will be used to pay creditors. It's not an end run, it's better than the alternative which would be creditors going after shareholders to recover their debts. (which is why bankruptcy protection exists)

That makes sense. Thanks!

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

What assets do they have worth $75M?

75,000 Aeron chairs.

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.

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.

Music is a dying industry because there's too much good free music floating around. Look at labels like 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.

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.

> 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.

But not enough to eat. Certainly not for two, three or four (or more) members of a band.

$24k is the marginal cost of the recording. In this model the band's living is paid for by touring.

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.

But so many $10/month people are people like I am who rarely buy new stuff and just listen to older stuff and the radio. I listen to music a lot, but most of the bands I prefer have ceased to exist for a while. That being said, I don't subscribe to any services because I'm cheap and I hate the way I can't get everything I want in once place so I run off of my own storage.

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