Rdio
Rdio, the streaming music service that isn’t Spotify or Beats or Google Play, has some of the best social discovery tools on the market—if you know where to look. Now, with a fresh redesign, Rdio hopes a new version of its mobile and Web apps will help everyone find those features and convert free ad-supported listeners into paying ones.
The entire service has been reconfigured to better promote its stations. It’s basically a Pandora-like experience where you can select a track, artist, playlist, or even another Rdio listener and generate a station based on your selection. They’re free, and ad-supported unless you’re a paying subscriber. Similar to Beats Music, Rdio also is coming out with human-curated stations that will be based on moods, activities and times of day; this might be something like a running mix, or a station full of tunes to listen to while you get it on.
You’ll encounter stations front and center when you log into Rdio now, where they are prominently displayed on a new “Home” screen. Previously, the app would display a “Heavy Rotation” screen when you first fired it up on mobile or the Web—basically what was spinning in your network, including the things your friends were listening to. That’s been replaced by Home, which Rdio thinks of as something akin like a personalized music magazine made up of “music stories.”
Rdio’s new Home screen starts with the option to Keep Listening. Screenshot: WIRED
When you land in the app now, the first thing Home will do is offer to let you keep listening to whatever you left off with. As you scroll down, you’ll start to see other suggestions like “this week’s hottest new music,” which shows you new releases you might be interested in based on your previous listening activity. Then there’s “on the rise in your network,” or shows what’s trending with your friends. If there’s an artist you listen to a lot, Rdio will offer you the chance to “dig deeper” into that band or musician’s catalog, showing you albums and songs you haven’t listened to before. The more you interact with all this, the more you listen and play, the more Home adjusts to offer a personalized experience for you.
Part of this personalization push means trying to help people get more social. To that end, Rdio has an improved “find people to follow” feature that can pull in contacts from your address book, Facebook, and Twitter. Once you build out your network, you’ll start seeing comments your friends have left on songs and albums showing up in your home screen. You’ll see the stations they’re listening to, and dive-deep features like one that shows which albums or songs friends come back to again and again. One of the coolest features we’ve seen in Home is one that shows, in real time, what your friends are listening to right now—we’ve found it to be both a source of inspiration and hilarity.
A Now Playing option shows what your contacts are playing in real time. Screenshot: WIRED
The other big idea in this redesign is converting free users to paid ones. Rdio found that lots of people bail out during registration, or during opportunities to upsell. It’s pushing those features into the background just a bit to give you the option to listen more, and be a bit more subtle about subscribing. For example, while you won’t be prompted to sign up for an account if you just come to the site and start streaming a station, if you try to click on back after a song plays you’ll be told that’s only an option for paid accounts, and offered the chance to sign up.
I’ve been using the new version for a few days, and it’s just great. Rdio’s always had fantastic discovery features, but this new version brings them to the forefront in an accessible way. In doing so, Rdio also offers a full spectrum of new ways to enjoy your music—based on albums and playlists you curate, or simply by sitting back and letting the algorithms work for you. If you haven’t given it a shot lately, it’s worth another listen.
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