Why Rdio died

[danr4]

"Rdio, I guess, made the mistake of trying to be sustainable too early," Miner says. "That classic startup mistake of worrying about being profitable and having a business that makes any sense before you’ve reached this astronomical growth curve."

A. Mistake of having a business that makes sense? Are you kidding me?

B. Spotify and Pandora are heading straight towards the same fate as Rdio.

[jfb]

The mistake is in diving into a commodity business where you don't control the only thing your customers care about. It's like artisanal gas stations or something.

[davecap1]

If Spotify becomes its own "label" then it'll probably have a better chance... given the size of its user-base.

[cwyers]

What Spotify has going for it is the social graph -- people trade playlists via Spotify, and if all your playlists and your friend's playlists are in Spotify, it makes it harder to switch because of cost or Taylor Swift. It also has probably the most omnipresent music app (although annoyingly no app for Xbox One).

[firasd]

The problem is that with low scale and low growth prospects, even a profitable business can end up stagnating. Will everyone (founders, employees, investors) want to stay on?

Especially in this case: the business isn’t in a high-​margin niche; it has large direct competitors like Spotify, Apple, Google.

[rickhanlonii]

I'm in denial. I refuse to believe this is happening.

When Rdio is gone there's going to be a huge hole in my life that needs filled with good design and experience browsing my music. iTunes is a shitshow. Spotify is ugly. Pandora is radio. It's all rubbish.

The Winamp revival cannot come soon enough.

[eterm]

Have you tried google music? I find that <random song> radio, while a little too "just one genre" is good for finding new artists and music.

They also have a decent "blogged 50" playlist which is recent/modern music.

Other than that, I mostly listen to kexp.org for a good mix of music. Sometimes for radio you can't beat the radio.

[apocalyptic0n3]

Definitely look at Google Play Music. Large catalog and you can upload any song they don't already have. Plus you get ad-free YouTube now along with some added YouTube features on mobile

[aluhut]

Never went for this. Sadly I have a problem with most of the mp3-playing apps too. Because of their overly "clever" design.

I want to view my tracs as they are in my folder. The only app I've found that can manage this is "Folder Player" but I have the feeling it's huge.

[m52go]

> Spotify is ugly

Which platform? I've heard this criticism before but I don't understand it.

I use the service on Android, OS X, Windows, and Ubuntu...and while it may not be 100% beautiful throughout, I think it manages to balance decent aesthetics with decent UX better than most mainstream apps out there.

[neduma]

Feels the same. I'm a paid subscriber. FWIW - I love their UI

[lagadu]

Look into it, there are many, many other music subscription services other than apple music and spotify. Just off the top of my head: Deezer, Tidal, Rara, Groove.

[gozo]

> The Winamp revival cannot come soon enough.

Is this what you want? http://spotiamb.com/

[supercoder]

Have you tried Apple music ? It's great.

[grumblestumble]

have you tried vox ( http://coppertino.com/ ) ? I really like it, and it hearkens back to Winamp in a lot of really nice ways.

[btbuildem]

Wow that really sucks. I use Rdio daily. It's really good for exploring new music - I've built up a great list of favourites. Is there any way to back that info up locally?

[stdgy]

Yes. You can extract your favorites as a CSV with this extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rdio-enhancer/hmaa...

Now I'm looking around to see if it would be possible to import the contents of that CSV into another service. It looks like Spotify has an API to add a track to a user: https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/save-tracks-user/

And there's a third-party API some folks cooked up for Google's service: http://unofficial-google-music-api.readthedocs.org/en/latest...

Might have to play with them this weekend.

[hcarvalhoalves]

I was a Rdio subscriber for a year before Spotify, and I can say I left it because of:

- Buggy desktop app (used Flash player and would eat 100% CPU)

- Buggy mobile app [1]

- Restricted library (lots of tracks marked as "not available in your country", which defeats the point of having an online streaming service).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7074056

[KingMob]

To be fair, the country restrictions are caused by the labels, not Rdio.

[oddevan]

Most of my friends are (were?) on Rdio. I liked it to a point, until the music library I'd built was suddenly cut in half because reasons? Reasons pertaining to exclusivity arrangements with other services, or label agreements expiring, or whatever. But basically, reasons.

It's enough to turn me off of cloud-based music services entirely, honestly. I'm only considering possibly ever subscribing to Apple Music because they let you upload tracks you own that they don't have. I hear Google Music does the same thing? Or maybe I'll finally set up that Plex server...

[creeble]

So true. I remember the first time I brought up an old-ish Spotify playlist, only to discover that all of the songs were now unplayable, with no explanation. All of the songs still existed on the service, but those IDs just expired for some reason. Same happened on Rdio from time to time. Presumably this is a record company issue, not one endemic to any particular service.

But as much I wanted to love Rdio, the app (Android in particular) had many bugs that would cause it to crash or lock up, and some that would send my network connection off into the weeds, requiring (at least) an airplane-mode reset.

And despite the claims of "elegant, groundbreaking", what music app has Search on slide-out besides Rdio? With results that appear in a 1/3-size screen?

Time to figure out how to get my playlists over to Rhapsody, the Little Music Service That Could.

[marssaxman]

It's really nice having all the music you like safely stashed away on a local hard drive, no cloud anything, where there's no chance that any future copyright-mafia skullduggery can take it away from you.

[bhouston]

I was a rdio subscriber and their Andriod app was unreliable - it would just stop working and have to be force killed. Yes, I can do that but for most people, that is pretty horribl. Even I switched to Spotify after a while.

[mdellabitta]

Just as a alternative view: I was a Spotify user but their Android app was unreliable... my phone would hard reset occasionally. Then I started using Google Play Music.

[BFay]

I've had the same issues - with some updates it gets better or worse, it's pretty annoying. Another thing that concerns me with the app is that the setting to only download/stream tracks on wifi doesn't seem to be honored; if I have autoplay on in my car, it will start streaming songs I've never downloaded over 4G.

Apart from that, I love the service, and I'm sad to see it go!

[datamoshr]

I was the same, those issues paired with a bad bitrate offering was the nail in the coffin for me.

[bloke_zero]

I loved the interface design and discovery. There was a lot to like about Rdio, but no gapless playback? C'mon who wants to listen to Darkside of the Moon with a 2 second pause between each track?

[axx]

For someone like me who was using Spotify for a few years, the short experience with Rdio that i had was like "Oh, ok, it's basically like Spotify. I keep using Spotify then."

[hyperchase]

Alternatively, I used Rdio first and tried out Spotify when they released the Playstation4 integration and my reaction was "Oh, ok, it's basically Rdio but with a lousy interface. I'll keep using Rdio then".

[inthewoods]

Given the brutal reality of the streaming music business, it would not shock me if Spotify suffered the same fate.

[axx]

The difference is, Spotify has a HUGE brand. When Spotify launched it was like iTunes, but you could listen to everything "for free". Sure, it wasn't free but compared to paying for every Album i'd listen to, a flat rate is basically free.

[KingMob]

Spotify may be somewhat insulated, since the major labels now have a large ownership stake in it. OTOH, I suspect Spotify will jack its prices up over time as the labels tighten the screws.

[reiichiroh]

I don't know how other also-rans like Dash and Deezer can keep raising funds to pursue the razor-thin streaming music business.

[tomekn]

I love how easy it is to browse for music by record label on rdio. Not something you can do on other platforms and it's a great way to discover new music! It'll be sad to see it go.

[ituitu]

Searching by record label is a hidden feature on Spotify. Try typing label:"Atlantic records" in the search box.

[jazzyk]

Does not hurt, but I think most people don't really care or remember the record label.

For me the killer feature would be a sophisticated implementation of "if you like this song, here are some you may also like". Sophisticated, because the music I like is usually an amalgam of multiple styles, for example jazz-funk-soul. The existing software is way too simplistic right now:

1.it usually classifies music in exclusive styles (soul or jazz, but not both),

2. the recommendations that come up are usually the well known artists, and I am more interested in less known ones (because I am familiar with all the big names already).

[altendo]

As someone who worked at GS, this kills me. I hate to see a streaming service go down like that. I've mostly been listening to my library in Amazon's online player - not a particularly big fan of Prime Music at all, bleh - but I did give Rdio a try and enjoyed it. It was a much more enjoyable experience than Spotify. Definitely feeling for the company.

[dbg31415]

I can't for the life of me figure out why we need 18 different services that do -- from my perspective -- the exact same thing. Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, Google Music, Amazon, Rdio... can't tell the difference between any of them, so I just use whichever one gives me a free month that month in all the spam marketing crap they send out.

[wishinghand]

Competition is healthy. With 18 different services to do more or less the exact same thing, prices stay down. If there was only Spotify and they raised their prices to higher than what you prefer, what company would you turn to?

[mikikian]

And for those interested, here's the sale process and purchase agreement fro their bankruptcy filings ( https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5k5SQee7k5pT3ZGVGZiU01jSE0... )