Rdio and Mog Going Free
 

Rdio and MOG will be joining the ranks of Spotify by expanding their "free music offerings" in the near future. The rumor is that this is going to coincide with Facebook launching more music integration into their product at their upcoming developer conference, F8. After arguably one of the best years in music, it's my opinion that it's a great time to be a music fan.

Very excited to see how Facebook integrates all three of these.

Great news

I'd be stoked about Rdio. I prefer their UI way over Spotify's.

Rdio needs to be free so I can play with it and see if I need to switch from Spotify, which I currently pay for.

However, I imagine when Apple release iCloud, and integrates it with iTunes and iPhone, it might be too convenient to ignore.

I already pay for Rdio, but it's nice to see a free option so I can convince my friends to try and give them a try.

Slightly different model. But iTunes match seems pretty interesting. I think iTunes needs to open up their catalog to streaming ... that would be too convenient to pass up. I love the social/discovery aspects of Rdio/Spotify/Mog. I don't like having to go find an album to download and see if I like it or find a myspace stream or something ... it's awesome to have it all in one location.

One of my least favorite music years in recent memory. In fact, can't think of a worse year in the past decade.

Not to slight the many great (and good) releases, but other years have '11 eclipsed.

I have been using Spotify a bit. I have really only used it for things I know I want to hear before purchasing. My question for Spotify and Rdio is, what are the search features like to discover new artists? As much as I was not a Myspace fan, around 2005-2007, maybe 2008 they had a pretty good search function/ability for music artists.

:lol:

There are some users I just absolutely LOVE knowing I am on the opposite spectrum from ... you are definitely one of them. Warms my little soul.

Do you think iTunes Streaming would completely negate a reason for any of the other services if they had easy sharing features within it?

The feeling is usually mutual. Strange we do agree on a few bands from time to time though.

Would be interesting to see, if you had to toss together a list of your favorite years in the past decade, however quick/haphazard it would be, what would it look like?

This is true. Actually, the ability to stream anything is what will keep Spotify and Rdio prevalent over iCloud. I'm on the verge of jumping to the $10/month Spotify.

Not particularly. Features and catalog will play a big role. If I could combine my catalog + a streaming catalog that had all the stuff I wanted on it ... I'd be in heaven. If it's well designed, even better. Hahah. I think some of the other services would be able to differentiate themselves -- but Apple's hardware being so prevalent would give them a big upside and headstart. However, Apple doesn't take things into the web often ... being stuck inside of iTunes kinda sucks in some situations.

:shrug:

I think the key here is what Facebook is apparently trying to do ... make it so that it doesn't matter what service you're on. So if you're a member of service X and you "share" a song on Facebook ... and your friends are members of service Y -- they'll still be able to play the song. THAT's what's really cool. They become the defacto sharing tool and allow more music to be discovered by friends.

Yeah, the services have changed how I look at music. I used to collect mp3s and hard copies -- I now get annoyed when I'm sent a CD. Hahah. Don't mind having mp3s, until I can put all of it in the cloud ... then I'll not care about those either.