Android App Spotlight #15: Rdio

Price: Free, with $9.99/month subscription

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Back during my freshman year of college I recall getting turned on to this new service called "Rhapsody" which allowed you to play any song you wanted via the desktop client of your computer. It wasn't the only service of its kind at the time, and since then the space has grown further. I stopped using the service within a year (and stopped paying for the service a year or two afterwards, because I completely forgot to cancel my subscription), because I had my ample iTunes music collection to allow me to listen to anything I wanted. The service would be nice for trying new music without having to buy, but because I'm adept at the internet, I can discover most any music to try without paying the $15 a month.

Today, my music collection is 175GB strong, and I still have no desire to pay to stream a compressed song over my desktop speakers. My phone, on the other hand, is a different story. Music apps like Pandora and Last.fm are popular on both Android and iOS, and while they can provide an easy way to introduce you to new music based on algorithms, you don't have too much say in which song plays next. Given the ubiquity of 3G, and the lack of 175GB microSD cards, I can't carry most of my music with me, so streaming once again becomes an option worth considering.

Rdio is a new social music service currently in invitation-only beta. It offers the music library of streaming services like Rhapsody, but also some social aspects like Last.fm. More importantly, the service offers a way to sync the music on your desktop into the service - similar to the gone-but-not-forgotten Lala, so provided Rdio has the rights to it, it is automatically entered into your collection. Even more importantly, there's a pretty slick Android app, which not only looks better than the stock Android music player, but also offers the ability to sync songs to your phone for offline play.

It's still a new service, so there are some problems - after syncing my desktop music, I have the same album listed sometimes three times in my collection, and others with notes in the song titles - particularly in rap albums - might not match the song title that Rdio has it listed, so I have to search and manually add those tracks. Other albums were added to my collection, despite the fact that Rdio doesn't have the rights to them, so I can't play them - this angers me more than it should. 

I have a 16GB microSD card in my Nexus One now, and about half of that is filled with albums I'm listening to at the moment, but there's been more than one occasion when I'm in my car and want to listen to a song but I forgot to put it on the card. Provided Rdio offers it, I think this will be a useful service, though I'm not sure if it's useful enough to justify the cost of subscription. I think others who aren't as reliant on their offline music collection might find it immediately more useful. Lifehacker has a good rundown of the features if you're interested in learning more.