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

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

#201

I was one of Rdio's first employees (3rd) and have been a happy subscriber since Craig got billing to work. After FB employees got free Rdio, they gave Rdio employees free Rdio as well, but I kept paying—to retain the right to bitch. (I got a free account for my wife though.) My entire extended family have been paying for and swearing by Rdio for years. I was introduced to Erlang at Rdio (this shaped the future of my…

It's still unfortunate because this easily the best product in the market. They cared deeply about the experience...

Vdio was a terrible decision though.

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

#202

I just checked out Youtube Music today and its pretty awesome and you are able to leverage all the great catalog of music uploaded to Youtube. I'm surprised more people are not using it/talking about it. I really do see this as a spotify killer if its gets some steam and some of the discovery features you get with spotify.

If Youtube Music Key is not drawing directly from curated uploads from artists, it's going to be an opaque mess of poor quality lossy uploads.

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

#203

Ctrl+F Soundcloud.. crickets I once made a chrome extension to add global keyboard shortcuts to Soundcloud and now that is literally all I listen to all day (I know, artists aren't getting a penny from me and that is bad, especially for small indies, I would buy much more music off bandcamp if the ux wasn't so atrocious). My point is, surely I'm not the only one here using SC exclusively? Just curious.

The problem with Soundcloud is that the freely available "preview" versions are 128 kbps transcodes,[1] which is pretty mediocre quality (and possibly worse, if the source was lossy to begin with).

[1]: http://uploadandmanage.help.soundcloud.com/customer/portal/a...

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

#204
post #159

I was one of Rdio's first employees (3rd) and have been a happy subscriber since Craig got billing to work. After FB employees got free Rdio, they gave Rdio employees free Rdio as well, but I kept paying—to retain the right to bitch. (I got a free account for my wife though.) My entire extended family have been paying for and swearing by Rdio for years. I was introduced to Erlang at Rdio (this shaped the future of my…

> "Are we really going to start using Spotify after so many years of hating on it?" —our 15-year-old. Genuinely curious here - why are so many techies desperately passionate (both positive and negative) about choice of unseemly unnecessary tech products? I feel like there is this peculiar subculture of tech-minded folk who defend at odds their tech choices. "Slack is the best" "Hell no, IRC has been around for years!…

As a dev, if you are tool-agnostic, then you're also productivity-agnostic.

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

#205

Rdio made a mistake by trying to compete directly with Spotify. And Pandora is making a huge mistake by shutting down the service and losing a valuable niche group of users. Everyone I know who actually uses Rdio is DIE HARD (I see evidence of this in the comments too). The users I know are pro audio guys, musicians, programmers, artists, etc who use the app 6+ hours a day across desktop and mobile. Rdio could easily…

Yeah, I just switched to rdio and I love it. The interface is so clean and slick. It's a lot less buggy / unreliable than Spotify imo. It's such a pity.

Strange. I was the biggest Rdio advocate until it just flat out didn't work on my MacBook. Tried uninstalling and reinstalling with no luck. Support couldn't do much for me. I ended up moving to Spotify and while I agree that Rdio has a superior UI, Spotify worked consistently on my machine. Plus, their mobile app, especially offline playback, is a godsend on long trips.

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last two points are extremely debatable. I have used Google, Spotify, and Pandora, and in my experience, Google's hands-off auto-generated playlists are extremely high quality. They also have great radio/curated playlists via the Songza acquisition. Spotify is a clear winner for a social experience, but I think you're really underestimating Google on the other dimensions.

Coming from Rdio, I'm genuinely curious where you find the social experience in Spotify. Is it all in FB? In Rdio I really enjoy the comments feature and how generally constructive it tends to be. In addition it's easy to find people with similar musical tastes in the list of recent listeners - I've followed people via this mechanism and found great music as a result. I don't see how to do the same in Spotify at all.…

Man I took the ability to follow people based on musical tastes for granted - I spent so much time looking for people all over the world who were listening to interesting stuff and ever morning I download a few albums I found on the Trending page.

I'm just lost with Spotify and Google music, I go there and see pictures of Justin Bieber and I don't know what to do. Apple Music is a little better but it's a totally different approach, being told what's good by record labels and "tastemakers".

The way Rdio did it just seemed natural, like going over to someone's house and checking out their record collection. I almost think the others are avoiding letting you see who is listening to what so they and the labels can push more Beiber stuff.

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

#209
post #195
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tech generation grew up in a 'free' culture of internet: illegal downloads, open source, pro bono collaboration. Paying for something that is equally equivalent to something that was free for decades usually is a tough sell. This doesnt apply to all people.

This probably also explains why it's so hard to find a good editor. So many devs are totally unwilling to pay a decent amount for anything. Maybe the exception being hosting. Outside of hosting a server and dns and an SSL cert, it's hard to get engineers making 6 figures to spend more than $50 on a tool they use every day of their working life. Intellij recently switched to a new plan that adds up to like $15 to $10…

> it's hard to get engineers making 6 figures to spend more than $50 on a tool they use every day of their working life.

On the flip-side, why invest all of your time become accustomed (possibly married) to an ecosystem that is beholden to someone else? Just because you spend $100 on VisualStudio doesn't mean that MS will take your input to heart when some manager "on high" decides to change direction with the product.

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

#210
post #159

I was one of Rdio's first employees (3rd) and have been a happy subscriber since Craig got billing to work. After FB employees got free Rdio, they gave Rdio employees free Rdio as well, but I kept paying—to retain the right to bitch. (I got a free account for my wife though.) My entire extended family have been paying for and swearing by Rdio for years. I was introduced to Erlang at Rdio (this shaped the future of my…

> "Are we really going to start using Spotify after so many years of hating on it?" —our 15-year-old. Genuinely curious here - why are so many techies desperately passionate (both positive and negative) about choice of unseemly unnecessary tech products? I feel like there is this peculiar subculture of tech-minded folk who defend at odds their tech choices. "Slack is the best" "Hell no, IRC has been around for years!…

You have to keep in mind that this is a kind of game. Almost no one truly, really hates the other product. People don't get into fistfights over Vim vs. Emacs. It's just a community joke.

So for instance I'm in the IRC camp of group communication, and I'll go to great length to use it over Slack, but if you really need me to use Slack and it makes sense, then I'll use Slack. But I will be doing cynical jokes so that you won't forget I'm in the other camp :P.

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