Why I’m leaving Rdio for Apple Music
For a solid five years I paid Rdio $4.99 a month. During that time I’ve discovered (and bought) a handful of albums, and spread the word about a lot of good music.
Since I left AOL Music back in 2011, the whole, “streaming music thing” has kept me current with new releases, and since I haven’t lived in any one zip code for more than six months over the past five years (after leaving NYC with my bike and a laptop in 2010) I haven’t been able to carry and manage a CD collection. That’s why I fell in love with Rdio.
However, the past few years have been filled with slow internet connections and too many horrid first-week sales numbers of bands I love, so I’ve returned to tending to my iTunes library.
Music streaming, along with BandCamp, and a handful of amazing music folk I follow on Twitter, is all about discovery for me (sorry music blogs), and when I discover something I love I buy the album.
With Apple Music getting into the streaming music arena, and my rejuvenated iTunes collection, I wanted to see how well it worked:
It’s not perfect, but it does the job well enough to end my half-a-decade love affair with Rdio.
And there are just two reasons why I’m done with Rdio:
- That’s from 2012. Another in 2014 (and one from recently that Rdio actually acknowledged). Rdio just can’t seem to sort new releases by genre, yet Apple Music did this right out of the gate.
2. Rdio “disabled the option to purchase MP3 downloads.”
I am wary of any streaming music service that is moving me away from actually buying an album.
In just a few days of using Apple Music I’ve bought an album because it was in the New Music section (s0rted to the genre of my choosing, ahem). First I streamed it (Phinehas, ‘Till the End’), of course, but then two clicks later I was in the iTunes Store and bought it.
For me, I care about discovering music in a clean, legit interface, and then being able to purchase albums with as few clicks as possible.
As it stands today, Apple Music does all that for me.
