Pandora to Buy Rdio Assets for $75M, Rdio Files Ch.11, Will Shutter Service

There's not enough listeners for the number of music services. If your service stumbles, it's easy to move onto something else, so you really only get one or no chances to convince your potential customers.

My experience with Rdio was one of frustration. Their desktop player was buggy and frequently failed to play anything at all. When it did work, I found the consistency of the music catalog to be unreliable. One week they'd have the license to an album I wanted to listen-to, and then they'd lose it, and I couldn't listen to that anymore. I'm not sure what factors were at-play on their end to cause that to happen, but it was a horrible experience for he listener.

I wanted to like Rdio, but they failed at the basics in my experience.

Any detail about what's going to happen to existing user accounts? As an Rdio subscriber, I want to make sure my existing collections and playlists don't just get deleted.

Interesting. The only reason I used rdio was because of all of the good initial impressions designers and product people I knew had of it. The biggest assumption it made was that people understood the 'sliding pane' UI as being self evident, and it wasn't.

Wouldn't the only reason there being limited choice be because of the way music deals are structured? I'm not familiar enough with how those work but having a mismatch of payouts / winning labels vs listeners would be a problem.

I've been told by people in the position to know that the 2010-era streaming services (Rdio, Spotify, Mog) were all effectively the same company: owned mostly by the music studios (in exchange for licenses) with a minority stake for each's particular founders/investors. As Dalton Caldwell cautioned in 2011, licensing costs make music startups are nigh impossible [1].

For people who are willing to pay for a music service, it seems pretty hard to beat Google Music's value proposition. Because it's a Google service, it can afford to compete as much as it needs to on price, and it also includes ad-free access to all of YouTube. I certainly wouldn't want to be a startup vying for that same $10 per month against one of the most popular content plays in the history of the Internet.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTOlrN5-UGU

"There's not enough listeners for the number of music services. If your service stumbles, it's easy to move onto something else, so you really only get one or no chances to convince your potential customers."

I agree, and even feel more strongly about it. Even if you don't stumble, it's hard to compete with Google and Apple at this point, because they have their services tightly tied in with their other products. Buy an iPhone (hell, or even a laptop or tablet), and Apple Music is integrated out of the box. Same with Google Music.

Personally I think Spotify is doomed to fail (for various definitions of "fail") for the same reason. There are some people who want their music decoupled from their OS/hardware, but I think there are so many more than want it to "just work", and I think that Apple & Google have a better shot at that than anyone else, at this point.