Rdio

"Rdio has millions of songs, from massive hits to rare gems to cult classics, with more added every week. It’s more music than you could listen to in a lifetime. Find what to listen to next by following friends, tastemakers, influential critics and artists themselves. Check out the most popular albums in your network or explore curated playlists. Build a collection of your favorites, so they’re always close at hand, and share the music you love with the people who might love it next."

Availability
Rdio is an ad-free music subscription service available in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Brazil (as Oi Rdio), Australia, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Sweden, New Zealand, The Netherlands, and Belgium.

It is available as a website and also has clients for the iPhone, iPod Touch & iPad, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone mobile devices, which can play streaming music or cache songs for offline playback. There are also clients for the Roku and Sonos systems. The web-based service also offers a native desktop client app for Mac OS X and Windows.

Its library has content from the four major record labels, as well as the Merlin Network and the aggregators IODA, INgrooves, The Orchard, CD Baby, RouteNote, IRIS Distribution, BFM Digital, Finetunes, and Catapult. Rdio also offers social networking, allowing users to share playlists and follow others to see what music they listen to.

Rdio was created by Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis and left private beta testing on 3 August 2010. The founders were also behind file sharing network Kazaa.

Free accounts
New users will automatically get Rdio Free for up to 6 months on their computers (but limited to 20 hours per month), but you’ll need a payed subscribtion to use Rdio on your smartphones, tablets and home media devices. Interestingly, it is possible to create multiple accounts (based on different email-addresses) that can be used to play each other's collection and scrobble to the same Last.fm-profile.

Focus
Contrary to Spotify Rdio is much more focused on albums and building up a listener library (although it still doesn't keep track of the number of times tracks or albums are played). It also supports creating playlists but if these become to long (more then 1000 tracks) the opening of these lists will seriously drain system resources.

Social
Listeners can follow each other, see their activity, subscribe to their playlists and see+listen to their music collection. The people who are followed influence your Heavy Rotation-section by what they have played (unclear if this an All Time or a periodic system). The weight for this is based by if an album is played, not by the number of times or number of played tracks. Contrary to the Label Collection-view the User Collection/Playlist-view also shows the releases that are not available to certain regions.

Playlists
Besides the track-limit caused by the available system resources, Rdio does not have the option to use playlist folders. This makes it very hard to use the service when there are too many of them. A workaround for this is to use multiple accounts so these can at least be separated by type: genre, label, outside playlists, etc.

Web Apps
There are no apps for the website available even though Rdio does provide an API.

Desktop App
There is a desktop app by Rdio (Mac/Windows)

Extensions

 * Rdio Enhancer Chrome extension that provides the option to to a playlist by: artist, album, track or random. It can remove duplicates and/or fork a playlist. It can also tag and filter albums that are in any collection (data is stored locally). All of these functions are handled by the extension (client-side) so these actions make take some time depending on the size of the collection/playlist.

External Websites

 * Bipolar Radio Type in an artist, and you’ll get an endless stream of music by similar artists. When you need to hear a high energy song, just click on the yellow happy face and you’ll instantly hear a high energy song by the currently playing artist. Similarly, if you’d like to chill out, just click on the green face and you’ll instantly hear a low energy song that should help you relax a bit.


 * Boil the Frog Create a seamless playlist between any two artists in 11 tracks.


 * Collection Chronology Visualize an Rdio collection chronologically and listen in-page.


 * Guess the Artist Guess who's playing the song from your heavy rotation, your network's heavy rotation or top albums from all Rdio users.


 * Ivy Use a Bookmarklet to add songs to your "Play Later" queue, add them yourself, or have your friends collaborate on your queue.


 * Music Maze The Music Maze lets you wander through the maze of similar artists until you find something you like. It uses The Echo Nest's artist similarity APIs and Rdio's web playback API.


 * Newdio.fm Newdio.fm looks up your Last.fm overall top artists and grabs a list of all artists with over 20 plays. It then looks up Rdio's new releases list and brings back a list of all new albums from your top albums.


 * Playlistdio Web interface for: Removing duplicate tracks from a playlist or Create a Top 50 playlist for an artist.


 * rrrrradio Soundrop with one room.


 * Re/Spin Easily import any Last.fm or Spotify playlist into Rdio.


 * Soundready.fm Name a band, get a playlist for their next show.


 * ThrowDown.fm 1. Choose a theme 2. Throw Down a song 3. Vote for best track 4. Win the Battle! 5. Discover new music