Rdio Prepares Pandora Competition with Free Radio Service
posted Saturday Oct 5, 2013 by Scott Ertz
The battle for mobile streaming just got another major player in Rdio. The streaming service has announced that their stations service, similar to Pandora or Last.fm, will now be available to all users of the iOS or Android apps, whether paid or free subscriptions.
With an inventory of over 20 million songs, you can play all the music you want, just like Pandora's recent policy change. You can listen based on artist, song, genre or the customized "You FM" which is a curated station based on your listening habits from other stations. In addition, with You FM, or any other station, you are able to share your music choices with your friends, allowing people to show their friends what their music taste really is.
Rdio believes that their implementation of The Echo's Nest Taste Profiling is superior to Pandora's Music Genome Project implementation, and I will have to say, it couldn't be much worse. Anyone who has ever had Jonathan Coulton transform into Ke$ha in just a few plays on Pandora knows what I am talking about.
Other than its preference for music profiling, what does Rdio have going for it? It has the same number of songs as Spotify, but far less than that of Xbox Music; it isn't available on BlackBerry, Windows Phone or Windows Store. The thing that really makes it unique is the size of its catalog available for free. If you are a fan of streaming music but not of the poor matching algorithm of Pandora, give Rdio a try; it might just be worth the install.
