Seven Days of Rdio

As a regular listener of tech podcasts from the United States, I have long been interested in the idea of streaming music services, but have been frustrated by the fact that very few of them seem to be able to break the border and come north to Canada. In the past, I’ve held both a free and paid subscription to Last.fm, but found its music playback system to be extremely limited, due in part to licensing restrictions that dictate how many songs from any album or artist can be played in succession.

A few days ago, I was catching up on my subscription to Jesse Brown’s Search Engine podcast, and found myself listening to Episode 95: Cloud Music Comes to Canada. In this episode, Jesse interviewed Rdio CEO Drew Larner about the streaming service’s Canadian launch. Immediately interested, I headed over to the company’s website and signed up for their free 7-day trial subscription. The following is a collection of my thoughts about the service, in no particular order:

Beautiful and Functional:

I have to hand it to the Rdio web team – their in-browser media player is one of the best web apps that I’ve ever used. The screen is organized into two panels: A thin side panel that shows currently playing media and controls, and a wider main area that allows you to navigate through the Rdio music library. One of the best parts is that this view is built entirely on Javascript, so you can browser through available music and queue up songs to play without any interruption in audio playback.

Speaking of audio playback, song quality is crystal clear, while tracks seem to start instantly, without any kind of buffering time. I’ve used a lot of media players in my time, and I think that this one might have the best user interface that I’ve ever seen. Navigating the massive library of available songs is simple and painless, and the prominently placed search bar provides a rich collection of query results:

The only major UI problem that I’ve encountered stems from broken links placed throughout the site. On more than one occasion, I’ve been reading an artist bio or album review, and clicked on a link to one of the albums mentioned therein, only to be transported off to a page for an album that shares the same name, but is by an entirely different artist. My guess is that all written content on the site is scanned wiki-style for clickable terms like album and artist names, and that the links are established without human intervention. In general, this process works, except when it fails to correctly choose between multiple potential targets.

A Truly Massive Collection:

Rdio has done an excellent job of collecting songs for their collection. During the aforementioned interview, CEO Drew Larner emphasized the fact that the company purposely negotiated US and Canadian rights to music at the same time. The result is that the vast majority of their collection is available in both countries, without the usual legal disconnect that other streaming services like Netflix suffer from.

Some of the usual suspects are missing from the Rdio library, namely the Beatles and Led Zeppelin. For the life of me, I’ll never understand what the publishing companies that own these pieces think that they’re gaining by holding them back from online streaming services. It’s a purely artificial shortage – like many fans of these bands, I already own my favourite Beatles and Zeppelin records in both digital and physical formats, so it’s not like holding them back is generating additional sales. It’s nothing more than a piss off for fans who would like to enjoy their music on alternative services.

With that said, the breadth of music available on Rdio is truly impressive. I’ve been able to find nearly everything that I’ve looked for, as well as a great deal of content that I’ve never heard, and intend to explore in the near future.

Finding New Music to Enjoy:

This is one of the few places in which Rdio makes a misstep. Other online streaming services that I’ve tried in the past (most notably the venerable Yahoo Launchcast) would start a new user’s experience by asking for a few artists or albums that the user enjoyed. Once this data was stored, the service would begin to recommend a mix of familiar and closely related songs that the user would rate in turn, thereby automatically growing their collection while introducing them to a great deal of new music in short order.

Rdio doesn’t seem to provide any such service. Even after I linked it to my existing Last.fm account, it scrobbled what I was listening to, but did not pull in favourite artists or songs from that account. Nearly every artist, album, and song on the site can be played as an “Rdio Station”, which plays of mix of the chosen content along with related material, and new users can choose to follow existing users and benefit from their plays and music suggestions. Despite these methods of discovering new music, there doesn’t seem to be a “genius playback” – a way to playback songs that you’ve added to your collection plus new recommended material.

Even after spending a few days with the service and growing my online “collection” of music to just under 250 songs, my account’s “Rdio Station” (music drawn from artists/albums that I’ve listened to, songs that I’ve added to my collection, and related material) was maddeningly boring to listen to.

In the image above, you can see that there are only 8 artists in a list of 16 upcoming songs – indeed, content from these 8 artists was repeated, and some individual songs (like that terrible What’s My Name song by Rhianna) came up in shuffle multiple times over a 2-hour listening period, even after I physically removed them from the list on more than one occasion. In my opinion, the concept of a personal Rdio station needs more work. It simply does not present a variable enough set of music, and does not expose me to music that I have not previously found on the site.

That said, the amazing breadth of the Rdio collection and the powerful search tools come very close to  compensating for this problem by making it incredibly easy to call up nearly any song that pops into your mind while listening. It doesn’t take long to get lost, wikipedia style, by following links in artist bios and one can quickly find themselves with more queued albums than they will ever realistically have time to listen to.

Finally, Rdio doesn’t allow you to rate music in a granular fashion like traditional media players do. Instead, it provides the more binary option of adding a song to your collection. This resembles the way that Last.fm allows users to “Heart” songs as favourites. Were I to adopt Rdio as a long-term replacement of my existing music library, I suspect that I would grow to dislike this design, as it does not seem (at least on the surface) to offer enough granularity to easily sort out a large music collection. With that said, a better automatic shuffle feature could solve the problem entirely.

The Big Question:

Will Rdio replace my traditional music collection? Probably not. I might use it to augment my collection, and to explore new music, as well as to listen to newly released albums before deciding whether or not to purchase them. The bottom line is that I probably won’t opt into the $5/month permanent account that is necessary to continue using the service once my trial runs out sometime tomorrow. The reasons behind this decision are varied, but ultimately come back to my experience with the site’s Rdio Station feature. Its lackluster performance means that listening to Rdio becomes a chore. I can’t just throw it on and sit back and listen; I have to intervene and queue up songs that I want to listen to every time my list runs dry.

With that said, I will most certainly come back to this service in 6 month’s time and give it another shot. It is one of the coolest sites that I’ve seen in a long time, and I do hope that it will continue to improve to the point where I am comfortable leaving my traditional media player behind.