My Review of Rdio

In which I question the purpose of Rdio’s existence.

Rdio Review

A few weeks ago, I decided to try Rdio. I had kept hearing from friends and on Twitter about how streaming music was the next big thing (ugh) in music. I researched my options and decided that Rdio was the best one out there. It had the best design and had great reviews from friends. I downloaded the Rdio app and signed up (a relatively straightforward process). I then moved the iOS Music app off my dock and replaced it with Rdio. I did the same thing with iTunes on my Mac. For the next two weeks, I used only Rdio. The result? I think that Rdio is a nice service. It has a great design, it is fast, and it has some features that iTunes doesn’t have—some features I want iTunes to have. However, I switched back to iTunes after those two weeks were up. Why? Fundamental flaws with the service. What does that mean? Read on.

I signed into the app and immediately did what I figure most people would try to do—discover music. Unfortunately, that’s rather impossible with Rdio. They have a section called Top Charts which has the most popular songs currently being played on Rdio. They also have Heavy Rotation which apparently uses the music that you have listened to and the people you follow to determine what music you may like. This page never really worked well. The Top Charts and Heavy Rotation pages always displayed identical music for me. While I found one or two songs I liked, most of the music was garbage1. Those pages were pretty much useless to me. The last page I found was called New Releases. Rdio describes it like so:

Browse hundreds of new albums, added every week.

The description describes my exact problem with that section. I don’t want to browse through hundreds of new albums, listening to each one, trying to find one I like. That is a huge time suck. I want to be able to sort by genre, see recommendations from the curators, new releases, and what is popular in that category. I don’t want to see what is popular for the whole service, most of it is pop junk. I want a layout that makes it easy to discover new artists, or rediscover old ones. Rdio’s idea of discovery is one long list of album art that never ends. That isn’t curation. That isn’t helpful. That is laziness on Rdio’s part. Why can’t I sort by music genre?

Since I couldn’t find new artists to listen to, I searched for one I already knew, Regina Spektor2. I encountered another problem here as well. Rdio search is terrible. When I searched for her, I was given a list of her albums with some songs mixed in. You can sort it by just songs or albums, but I think that, at the very least, her albums should be in one group, and her songs in the other, even if they are all on the same page. For example, I had to scroll down the page to get to her most recent album. What the what? Rdio has a bunch of her albums though, which made me very happy. At this point, I was browsing Rdio on my Mac, so I synced all the songs to my iPod with a click, which is a neat feature. Unfortunately, since Rdio isn’t a system app, the songs are only synced when the app is opened. I can’t hold this against Rdio though, they have no control over that. However, the offline mode is buggy in the app. It doesn’t always automatically switch between offline and online mode well and some of the songs in offline mode wouldn’t play (this was a bug though that was fixed in a subsequent update). One thing I found strange about the album page is that it has some statistics on how many people have played it and who played it recently. It isn’t a huge complaint, but I don’t really see the point of it there. Perhaps someone uses it somewhere, but I don’t really see how that is beneficial to many.

Scrolling to the bottom of the page, I found something stranger. Rdio has a Critic’s Review in the comments section of each album. I find this weird for two reasons. The first thing that is weird is that there is no link to the review. It just is there, with the reviewer’s name, but no link, publish date, or any other information that would help you find more about that review. The second problem I have with it is its existence. Why is it even there? Frankly, I would see it make just a little more sense in iTunes, when you are buying the album. With Rdio, you get full music previews. You can listen to every song as many times as you want and decide for yourself. To me, it just seems like a waste of space. Additionally, I find the fact that comments show up in albums in your collection a little weird, but I can see the point in that. This leads to another major issue I have with Rdio and streaming music services in general.

I like to own my music. I like to know that whatever happens, I will have that music. If I own a CD and the CD shop downtown closes (if it is still open at this point in time), I will still own that song. If Apple decided that iTunes was a big mistake and a stupid idea and decided to shutter it tomorrow, I would still own all the music I purchased. I would still be able to access all my playlists. Everything would go on as normal, except purchasing music would be much less convenient. If Rdio was acquired and shut down, all my music would go away. My entire music collection, along with all my playlists, would disappear. There would be nothing I could do about it. Internet services close all the time—how do you know that won’t happen to your favorite music streaming service next? Having unlimited music for less than $10 a month is nice until it goes away. Using an unlimited music subscription service is not forward-looking thinking. Thirty years from now, there is no guarantee that you will be able to still listen to that music there. That is my biggest problem with Rdio and a fundamental flaw with the entire concept.

What about something like Pandora 3? I find Pandora a whole lot more compelling because the point of it is music discovery. It is like iTunes Genius with sound4. You can’t choose the songs you listen to with Pandora, you just pick a general mood and it finds other songs you may like. I use Pandora to find new music. If I like it enough, I then purchase it on iTunes. If Pandora shut down, would it be annoying? Yes. Would it be the end of the world? No. I wouldn’t have lost my entire music collection. I just would have lost a great way to find music. Rdio actually offers a Pandora-esque radio service. However, I didn’t find it to work quite as well as Pandora, which didn’t really make it useful for me.

Despite my problems with the actual idea of Rdio, I did find some features I wish iTunes had. Rdio lets you share albums and songs to friends through email and Twitter5. You can even embed albums into webpages (which I guess is useful if you blog about music). iTunes lets you do the same (except for the embedding of albums) but it isn’t integrated in very well. To this day, I don’t know why iTunes on the Mac doesn’t use the built in Mountain Lion sharing options (the Mac App Store does). You also can’t share individual songs on iOS. You can on Rdio, which is great.

Another great feature of Rdio is the remote. Basically, when you are playing music on your Mac from Rdio, you can pick up your iPhone, and control the music from there. You can even start playing the music on your iPhone right from where you were on your Mac6. I found this super useful7 and wish I could do this with iTunes (built in). Since my whole music library is synced on my iOS music device, it would be really helpful to have that feature. It isn’t necessary, but it would be a fantastic feature to have.

Unfortunately for Rdio, the negatives far outweigh the positives. Discovery is terrible. In my two weeks of using it every day, I never once found new artists that I liked. I find new artists all the time in iTunes because I can easily sort by genre and Apple curates the best in that category. I usually find plenty of music I like. Genius also really helps with finding new music. If Rdio wants people to continue to use their service and find more music, I suggest they really work on the discovery process. A grid of the most popular albums does not cut it. I also have major issues with the very idea of streaming music services. Rdio may be fine for people who don’t care about their music collections, but it isn’t for me. And discovery still is terrible so I am not sure why you would want to use it ever. Rdio seems attractive from the outside. Practically free music! Who doesn’t want that? However, once you bite into the delicious looking exterior of the apple, you get to the rotten core infested with worms. Rdio has flaws that can’t be fixed unless they completely pivot and change the service. And I don’t think they plan to do that. Some people use Rdio so if they have a hard drive failure, they won’t lose all their music. I don’t worry about that as I use iTunes Match. It’s cheaper than Rdio. Others use Rdio side by side with iTunes, listening to full album previews on Rdio before purchasing it on iTunes. I have no need for that though. iTunes lets you preview a whole album at once and gives you 90 second previews for each song. I don’t need much more then that to figure out whether I like a song or not. The few cases where I can’t decide? I use YouTube. I think in the past year, I have only used YouTube for that purpose three times. I believe the people who are using it don’t really know what they want out of a music service but are using it because nothing truly offers what they want. However, I know what I want, so Rdio has no future with me.

1. Like this wonderful album by Nicki Minaj. ↩
2. I absolutely love her music and I suggest you listen to some of it. ↩
3. Apple is currently rumored to be working on a competitor to Pandora. ↩
4. In fact, I wouldn’t be totally surprised if Apple decided to make its radio service part of iTunes Genius. ↩
5. Also Facebook, but I don’t care about Facebook at all. ↩
6. You can already sort of achieve this for iTunes and the iOS music app with Seamless, but it is sort of clunky. ↩
7. When it worked, that is. I found the remote to have some sporadic problems. For example, it wouldn’t always pick up in the right place when switching from one device to another, and it sometimes completely restarted the song. ↩