Kazaa founders open legal music service called Rdio

Status
Not open for further replies.

Matthew DeCarlo

Posts: 5,271   +104

Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the founders of Kazaa (as well as Skype and Joost), have unveiled a new (entirely legal) music streaming service – an increasingly crowded market these days. Called Rdio, the startup will charge $5 to $10 per month for unlimited access across PCs and mobile devices. This same premise has long been available in services offered by Microsoft, Rhapsody, Napster and countless others.

Rdio is run out of San Francisco by 22 employees, and it'll open this week in an invitation-only preview with widespread availability expect later this year. Despite the rocky history between Kazaa and record labels, at least one has agreed to work with Zennstrom and Friis. "We resolved the past," said the Warner Music Group. "These guys are focused on the future."


On the surface, Rdio looks like any one of the other all-you-can-eat music services, but it promises to break from the norm by adding social features, such as letting users see what their friends are listening to. People can also view a list of the most popular music among their contacts. There's also talk of linking up with Skype somehow, but we're not sure how that would play out.

Permalink to story.

 
Not a big fan of streaming music services. The quality is crap - usually 128bit level which is barely high fidelity. That may work fine when I'm in the gym and there's a lot of background noise going on, but for home listening on a good stereo or PC system, it just doesn't cut it.
 
I assume you can also entirely download tracks given the note about playing music offline. There's no word on audio quality, but I assume it's on par with competing services.
 
but it promises to break from the norm by adding social features, such as letting users see what their friends are listening to.

Well that's nothing new. I can do that on my smartphone already with my messenger contacts and I can also do it on my different messengers on my computer. And iTunes is somewhat similar. When I stayed in the college apartments at my college campus, we were all connected to the same network and I could see who else had itunes and I could see what music they had in their playlists. So that feature isn't really groundbreaking.
 
matrix86 said:
....And iTunes is somewhat similar. When I stayed in the college apartments at my college campus, we were all connected to the same network and I could see who else had itunes and I could see what music they had in their playlists. So that feature isn't really groundbreaking.

he he my friend swiped a lot of music from ppl that way, just have to have the right software :D

As far as "Rdio" is concerned I don't see anything ground breaking about it. Personally I use Pandora's free music streaming and am happy with that.
 
The service is actually really good, now that it is officially launched. So far I am really happy with it, with the exception that it doesn't support my Blackberry Curve. I imagine that will change once BB OS6 is out, but who knows.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back