AfterDawn: News

Rdio launches in beta for Android devices

Rdio has launched the beta version of their Android app which will allow for unlimited music streaming on Android devices.

In October 2009, billionaires Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the creators of the Kazaa P2P client as well as Skype, announced that they had developed and financed the unlimited music subscription service, and the company introduced the service last month.



Separating the service from others like Rhapsody is the fact that Rdio allows users to listen from anywhere in "the cloud," including through their phones, instead of needing to download DRM-laced music locally.

Furthermore, Rdio has many social networking features connected to Facebook and Twitter.

Rdio has over five million tracks available from the major labels and thousands of indies.

To have access at home and via your phone, the service costs $10 per month. The beta is currently private,but TechCrunch has some.



Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 14 Jul 2010 0:08

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• 4 comments

• KillerBug

  That story leaves some big questions...
  
  1.) Can you choose your tracks, or does it just play something similar to what you want?
  
  2.) What is the quality when streaming over a fast internet connection?
  
  3.) What is the quality when streaming to a Droid, iPhone, etc?
  
  4.) Will they be expanding their library? 5 million tracks may sound like a lot, but it is really only about 350,000 CDs. Again, that sounds like a lot...until you realize how many CDs are made every year, and how few of them any one person will be interested in.
  
  If they could soothe my mind on those issues, I might just sign up; I could buy a whole year of this service for the price of a 32GB microSD card that won't hold 20% of my MP3 collection.

  14.7.2010 04:23 #1

• Mysttic

  Zackly, KillerBug nailed it on the nose; however until those answers are made public, at the very least its a diverse option from whats currently out there. Being forced to by individual tracks, all the bs on whether or not you have the right to copy each track to another device or you have to buy it again; it steered me from buying music ever.
  
  In fact I don't even dl music anymore, hadn't since 2005; the most I'll ever do with music is stream radio stations on the net because frankly I don't want to buy a cd when I only like 1 or 2 songs and the $ per track is just ridiculously high, especially in Canada, where I've seen them go as high on itunes for $2 a track.
  
  Should the questions be answered and more bands/labels get on board with this method, I could see myself subscribing. At least until they get the idea of incorporating advertising into it.

  14.7.2010 12:10 #2

• Josipher

  And yet another service only availible in the US..what a shame..

  14.7.2010 13:50 #3

• Mysttic

  That figures... Prolly cause in Canada we can get music more readily without as much enforced consequences.

  14.7.2010 14:32 #4