
Pandora to Buy Rdio Assets for $75M, Rdio Files Ch.11, Will Shutter Service - MarlonPro
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/16/confirmed-pandora-buys-key-rdio-assets-for-75m-in-cash-rdio-files-ch-11-to-shut-down/
======
rekoros
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 career) and
worked on the original implementation of the Heavy Rotation feature. I walked
around the office asking people "Does this look right? How about this?" I'd
upgrade Erlang code in production by hot-reloading the heavy rotation module,
and walk around some more. It was fun!

In 2011, I realized that Rdio will never succeed due to lack of fanatical
leadership—you can't have a company with absent founders, that's just not how
it works—and left. I've been expecting this sort of an "exit" for a while.

Today I work at my own startup (sameroom.io) and every single day I'm grateful
for the Rdio experience—mostly as a cautionary tale, unfortunately.

And now, we have to deal with this:

"Are we really going to start using Spotify after so many years of hating on
it?" —our 15-year-old.

~~~
mbesto
> _" 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!" "Let's fight!" I don't see any rational reason to "hate" on the
success of a company or a brand...

~~~
TeMPOraL
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.

~~~
rtpg
>People don't get into fistfights over Vim vs. Emacs. It's just a community
joke.

Unfortunately, this can get out of hand, see systemd death threats. Hope
people will learn to be nicer on the internet now that the general population
is on it.

~~~
Dylan16807
That's not a product rivalry, that's a deeper upset with how systemd is
handling things.

Nobody thinks vim is trying to take over the editor space.

~~~
EwanToo
But I would hope you'd still think that death threats over it are utterly
ridiculous, and unacceptable?

~~~
Dylan16807
Yes.

------
bsimpson
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTOlrN5-UGU)

~~~
matart
I really like spotify because I can use it on my phone, PS3, laptop, etc. My
phone can be the remote to my sound system in another room.

I also have a small data plan on my phone so I do not stream music. Spotify
allows me to download their songs for playing offline.

Does Google Music provide these or similar?

~~~
archagon
Spotify also has a native(-ish) OSX client (can you use Google Music outside
the browser?) and excellent playlist drag/drop and sharing support. Plus, I
love their iOS user interface. No other service has come close in either area.

I just wish they had better local file support.

~~~
ak217
A couple of years ago Spotify rewrote their clients to use CEF (Chromium
Embedded Framework), so since then their clients are in some sense native and
in some sense not, and much more consistent across platforms.

Anyway, I agree with you that they have been pushing the envelope in terms of
mobile functionality, especially iOS. Lately I'm not happy with how Android
has crippled their lock screen experience by screwing up the lock screen
widget API - but that's not Spotify's fault.

To any Spotify skeptics, I highly recommend trying the premium service. The
social feed, cross-device sync, BPM matching for runners, collaborative
playlists, Spotify Connect (ability to switch and control music playing on
another device), Algoriddm Djay integration, all changed the way I experience
music. Their radio/suggestions engine is not as good as Pandora's, but is
slowly improving. The only thing that is sort of a letdown is the
visualizations API, but I can see why it's not a priority.

~~~
barclay
> A couple of years ago Spotify rewrote their clients to use CEF

Eh. And not to sound like a cranky old man, but that shit sucks.

It's ridiculous that their "app" needs 20-30 seconds to boot on a modern
computer. It's a damned music player. Plus, when the machine is under load, it
skips like a 1993 disc player. And the damned thing crashes routinely.

Pre-CEF I was terribly impressed by their mac client. It's been a pretty ugly
cliff they've fallen off though. They did a developer blog post some time ago
detailing how teams are all using separate JS routines and libs... and I have
to say, I wasn't surprised. It's rare that a popular app regresses in
performance and usability quite as much as they have.

~~~
andrewingram
It takes roughly 2.5 seconds to load on my machine, not sure what's happening
on yours that means it takes 20-30 seconds.

~~~
Dylan16807
That's still 5-10x slower than it should be.

------
jeremyrwelch
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 carve out a dedicated customer base at the high-end who
would pay MUCH MORE for a Pro version (I'd do $50 a month).

~~~
tallerholler
ever since I discovered rdio a year or so ago I am always telling friends
etc.. I think their UI is superior and the experience is just better than e.g.
pandora imo...

~~~
jeremyrwelch
Exactly. I've recruited at least 4 friends to use the service. How many hours
a day would you estimate you use it?

~~~
viiralvx
I constantly use the service. I download songs to listen to offline while
driving, streaming albums / playlists while coding, and if I'm at home and
chilling, I normally have the Rdio Roku app playing music while I'm cooking or
keep my laptop on and connected to Bluetooth while remote controlling it from
my phone (phone notifications over Bluetooth audio get annoying). It's an
amazing service and I'm really sad to see it go. :/

------
tetraodonpuffer
that is really unfortunate, I much prefer Rdio's web interface to Spotify's
and for all the years I've been a subscriber it's been rock solid, on the
other hand I do think I am likely not the typical user (100% on desktop,
mostly listens to full albums rather than random songs, a lot of classical
music, etc.)

When Rdio shuts down I am really not sure where I will be able to go for a
comparable experience, Spotify for some reason appears to have random holes in
their classical catalog compared to Rdio, I am also not sure if Apple music is
useable without an iDevice.

what other alternatives can others suggest for users in Canada?

~~~
ryanSrich
Apple music is not usable with any device. Just to name a few issues I've
personally experienced:

\- Not being able to listen to music because itunes said I wasn't signed in.
(of course I was and the only way to fix it was to restart my computer.) This
error happens a few times per month.

\- Songs not playing and getting an alert error with some random code that
results in searching countless threads online. This happens multiple times per
day.

\- There's no way to get to an artist from a song...think about that. You
can't click on the artists name or select it from the dropdown menu while a
song is playing...So you have to search the song and then select the artists
name in the search results.

\- Absolutely no concept of syncing. Create a playlist on your computer and it
might show up on your phone? Create one on your phone and edit it on your
computer, but the changes don't reflect across devices. Everything just goes
to shit.

\- Extremely slow clunky UI. Click a button or link and wait 1-2 seconds for
some random UI thing to pop up so you can do whatever it is you set out to do.

\- Click any tab in the top navigation with the window set ot 50%0 of the
screen and the UI will flutter quite a bit making you select a tab you didn't
want to.

\- Click on a playlist that apple made and get an error saying something like
"This playlist is currently not available". This happens at least once per
week.

...I could go on and on. The ONLY thing Apple music gets right is
recommendations. IMO It is by far the worst piece of software Apple has ever
release.

~~~
zw
I have nothing to say about your other issues (I haven't experienced most of
them; I'm quite happy with the service), but the banner at the top of the More
(…) menu takes you to the album of a song, which then easily leads to the
Artist page. Do it all the time, takes me half a second.

------
uptown
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.

~~~
JonFish85
"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.

~~~
p0wnd
I won't switch from Spotify though because it meets my needs and furthermore
they keep innovating. One thing I can look forward to in getting back to the
office on Monday is my new week's playlist that Spotify creates for me. I
listen to a wide variety of music and they have helped me discover a lot o f
artists and songs I'm really into.

~~~
dom96
Totally agree. Spotify's weekly discover playlists have made me look forward
to Mondays.

------
wobbleblob
Ahh, Pandora. They were ahead of their time at one time. Then suddenly and
without warning, they kicked me out. "We don't want your filthy money, foreign
scum. English speaking countries only!"

Yes, I know how proxies and VPNs work, but I'm not going to spend money and
break the terms of service just to trick a company into accepting my money. If
they don't want to do business with me, then so be it. Spotify's
recommendation algorithm isn't as good (ooh, you liked a song in Russian? that
must mean you only want to hear Russian bands from now on, right?), but they
don't think I'm too foreign for them.

~~~
kyrre
isn't this due to complex licensing issues?

i created my original rdio account while living in London, and then when i
moved to Norway i decided to upgrade my subscription, at which point my
playlists became unplayable as a large portion of songs were suddenly marked
as "unavailable" in my region

~~~
wobbleblob
Spotify seems to have found a solution for these complex licensing issues.

Netflix allows me to pay them money, but they have a different selection
available depending on where I'm connecting from.

Initially, Pandora gave the impression that they were working on it, but how
long has it been, 10 years? They can go sit on the roof with a bunch of onions
as far as I'm concerned.

~~~
kyrre
yeah, that's a fair point i guess

------
disposition2
As someone who switched to Rdio from Spotify because the former has not
terrible music discovery, this is unfortunate. Looks like I'll be switching
again...it would be nice to find a streaming service that was about music
discovery rather than forcing the latest garbage down your throat.

Although who knows, maybe Spotify's radio now plays more than 10 songs...

~~~
vlunkr
Spotify now has a playlist called discover weekly or something that is songs
they pick for you once a week, and in my experience it's actually pretty good.
I've discovered several artists that way. And I also found Spotify radio to be
awful.

~~~
infecto
I love Discover Weekly. It is the one thing that has really stood out to me. I
have found a lot of songs/artists that I love using this service.

~~~
colmvp
Did they develop this in-house or acquire a technology for this?

~~~
bananaoomarang
Sounds like it was in house:
[http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/30/9416579/spotify-
discover-w...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/30/9416579/spotify-discover-
weekly-online-music-curation-interview)

------
_jomo
I really liked Grooveshark because it had a proper HTML5 player before they
shut down. I was looking for alternatives and recently found Rdio and was
quite happy with it, actually it has a lot in common with Grooveshark (e.g.
user stations).

Both Spotify and Deezer have web apps but they require Flash. Spotify has
forwarded people asking for an HTML player to the forum and they have
successfully ignored it for years. I sent Deezer a mail, they told me to "rest
assured we are considering all options" and "if a transition is made it will
take some time to implement".

Are there any alternatives that do not require a custom client or Flash (that
also work in Europe)?

~~~
smt88
The Google Play Music library is excellent (I think it's still the biggest).
You could try something like this:

[http://bluestackstutorial.com/2015/07/google-play-music-
for-...](http://bluestackstutorial.com/2015/07/google-play-music-for-pc/)

~~~
_jomo
Someone else just pointed out Google Play Music as well. Apparently it works
in the Browser without Flash?

~~~
smt88
It does need Flash, according to Google anyway[1]. People might be missing the
Flash requirement because Flash is bundled with Chrome.

1\.
[https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/1114577?hl=en](https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/1114577?hl=en)

~~~
dumol
The default player needs the Flash plugin, but there's an experimental HTML5
player that works in Chrome/Chromium (even the BSD ports). I have used it
almost exclusively for the past 9 months or so, and had no problems with it.

Here's how to enable it: [https://www.maketecheasier.com/enable-
html5-playback-google-...](https://www.maketecheasier.com/enable-
html5-playback-google-play-music/)

------
blackaspen
Bummer. I really like(liked?) Rdio. I've been a subscriber for several years
-- the UI I find to be pretty good, but their mobile apps are garbage.

So, who wants to write up an Rdio -> Spotify migration tool?

~~~
acdha
I was just looking at this one:

[https://github.com/jacobian/rdio2spotify](https://github.com/jacobian/rdio2spotify)

~~~
cbabraham
it worked!

------
danr4
As someone who thinks Rdio is the best streaming service for diehard music
fans, this really pains me.

With that being said, I definitely saw it coming.

No meaningful technical upgrades to the platform have been made in the past
year, while keeping the technical deficiencies. the mobile apps are a
disaster, and overall I had the feeling they were busy searching for a way to
stay afloat.

Sad day indeed.

------
mbrock
I subscribe to Spotify. If they would just let me view "My Albums" (which is
basically all I'm ever interested in) as an alphabetical list instead of a
canvas of _enormous_ pictures (4x2 fit on my screen), that would make me so
happy.

Every time they continuously deploy one of those "please upgrade" popups,
which is nearly every day (pretty annoying BTW, can't you just upgrade
silently? I've never even noticed anything change after one of these upgrades,
I don't care, especially not in the exact moment when I'm about to relax and
put on an album), I hope they'll have fixed this.

I really loathe how the streaming services don't allow me to customize my UX
in any way. Especially when it's harder to find albums in their clients than
in a shelf of CDs.

From what I can tell from random Google Music screenshots, it's also oriented
around the "grid of enormous pictures" paradigm. :(

~~~
criley2
In Spotify, instead of "saving album to My Music" I choose to create a
playlist of the album. It's just drag and drop to create the playlist on
desktop.

I choose to sort those into folders based on genre/artist/album, which works
well for me.

~~~
mbrock
Oh yeah, I have some of those old playlists cluttering up my sidebar... Wow, I
didn't know there were folders! Thanks, that might work for me too.

------
nbarbettini
I've used Rdio for a few years now, and this sucks. Spotify's UI doesn't
compete.

~~~
atourgates
I tried out both a couple years ago, found them to be pretty comparable in
terms of music catalog, and chose Rdio because I prefer their interface.

Recently, I've been noticing that some of the "people" I follow have stopped
publishing playlists to Rdio in favor of Spotify, so I've been considering the
switch. But it's a shame to have to leave Rdio's great HTML5 web interface for
either Spotify's native app or flash.

~~~
jnet
Spotify has a web player as well

~~~
_jomo
well, actually they have a web site with a Flash player.

------
crabasa
Here is Rdio's announcement of the shutdown:

[http://blog.rdio.com/us/2015/11/important-news-from-
rdio.htm...](http://blog.rdio.com/us/2015/11/important-news-from-rdio.html)

------
wylie
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.

~~~
gitah
I'm 110% sure subscriber accounts are part of the 'Key Assets' Pandora bought
from Rdio.

~~~
livingparadox
"...in the call today McAndrews made clear that those numbers [of users] are
irrelevant since that service is shutting down, not transferring."

~~~
gitah
How does that indicate Pandora doesn't get the contact information and payment
information of Rdio subscribers?

~~~
livingparadox
"not transferring"

------
craigds
This is a real shame. I just discovered Rdio about a month ago and it was a
breath of fresh air coming from Pandora (repetitive music discovery, and you
can't play a specific song/album) and Spotify (awful UI, cluttered and full of
bugs, and not web based).

I also had this handy bookmarklet to mute most of the ads:
[https://gist.github.com/craigds/14db5022a00b946ee14f](https://gist.github.com/craigds/14db5022a00b946ee14f)

I have no interest in a mobile app or downloading content. Streaming whatever
I want whenever I want on my laptop is important, and having a good discovery
mechanism is important too. Pandora and Spotify aren't up to scratch.

I don't think there are any decent alternatives to Rdio, though I just googled
and discovered Google Play Music is now available in NZ, so maybe I'll give
that a go.

~~~
ikawe
This

> This is a real shame.

And this

> I also had this handy bookmarklet to mute most of the ads:
> [https://gist.github.com/craigds/14db5022a00b946ee14f](https://gist.github.com/craigds/14db5022a00b946ee14f)

Might be related.

~~~
craigds
mute, not block. Rdio still gets paid.

------
samstave
Pandora: Rags to riches poster child of SV:

CEO cant make payroll; begs employees to stay and they do....

Pays $75,000,000 for assets of a competitor a few years later.

~~~
thrownaway2424
What did the employees get out of it?

~~~
samstave
Jobs?

------
danieleggert
Another Janus Friis company to add to the list.

------
ehmorris
Does anyone know a good way of exporting my rdio "history" data? I have years
of data in there.

~~~
ehmorris
Ah here's a solution: make a cURL request for all your history data.

Simple way to get a well formatted request:

* Go to the history tab ([http://www.rdio.com/people/username/history/](http://www.rdio.com/people/username/history/)) and pull up the inspector

* Scroll down once or twice and go to the network tab

* Find the `getHistoryForUser` request and right-click it, select "copy as cURL"

* Paste into your editor and change the "start" param to 0 and the "count" param to 99999

* Make the cURL request. Boom, no rate limiting. I got 3.5mb of history (though it seems to only go back 1 year.

~~~
JeremyHerrman
Thanks!!

------
Qantourisc
Thinking of going back to buying CD's (or getting Flac files). Streaming
services are to unreliable :/ They are only good for discovery.

~~~
yason
It takes a lot of trust to lose a lot of trust.

First there were records, then cassettes, then compact discs, and they all
wore out. A plausible lifetime for something you bought was maybe 15-20 years:
not really a problem but indeed a nuisance. You knew the day would come when
the cassette would snap or the CD would just jump way too much.

Moving to digital music was the big revolution. I could encode songs into
files on my computer and I could replicate those literally forever. I would
never, ever lose my music again, or be forced to buy it back in the de facto
format of the next decade.

Then came the streaming services. That meant convenience but it did trade in
even worse life expectancy and uncertainty. Anyone could bet money that a
digital streaming service in the 2000's would not be around 20 years later.
But they did become popular, especially when mobile 3G/4G data appeared
everywhere.

Ironically, while it did become possible to stream anything anywhere, you
could also fit all your audio files onto a memory card. Several times. At a
negligible cost. Surely you would only have your own collection with you, but
that collection was actually hundreds or thousands of compact discs all
compressed into a manageable amount of data.

For reference, I still have my music in ogg/mp3 format and digitally bought
albums as flac. I didn't have plans to move away from that and I still don't.

If I want my music in a new phone or in my car, I'll just replicate my
collection to a new device or memory card. And I then have the exactly same
collection on my phone that I have on my desktop. And my work computer. I
still have my 80's-90's CDs in the closet but I've ripped the most important
albums no later than the turn of the millennium, at the latest. The setup is
so manageable and dirt cheap that I can't but wonder what would it take to
replace it.

------
hobo_mark
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.

~~~
slouch
Just yesterday, I tried to find an album that Scott Melker had uploaded to
SoundCloud. It's gone, and he posted this announcement
[https://soundcloud.com/scottmelker/please-listen-a-
message-o...](https://soundcloud.com/scottmelker/please-listen-a-message-on-
my-soundcloud-takedowns-and-account)

So, SoundCloud can't present me with the discography of Black Sabbath, and a
smaller artist I enjoy can't even keep his music on the service.

------
zymhan
I'm interested to see if/how Pandora changes their service after this. It's
been a while since they added a new feature.

------
bennesvig
I've been a paying subscriber of Rdio for at least 3+ years. I loved that Rdio
let me explore other people's playlists, often leading to discover new
favorite songs. Also never liked Spotify's UI. I'm bummed to switch.

------
verelo
This has been an interesting 5 years for this space.

I had Grooveshark, but they didn't have an iOS app, so when i switched from
Android I went to Rdio.

When Spotify launched in Canada, I tried it, and quickly switched over simply
because the app was not complete junk. The Rdio song offering was fine, just
as good as Spotify as far as I could tell. The Rdio app, was terrible. 50% of
the time it would "play" but no sound would come out, the other 50% it would
sometimes work / sometimes just crash or lock up.

You cannot have a product that is half assed, when you are still trying to win
the market, and even if you have won you still cant for very long.

------
gldnspud
Too bad the now-defunct Rdio button on my Roku remote can't be remapped.

------
nathancahill
Interesting way to exit. Is that common?

~~~
elif
That's the part that intrigued me. Chapter 11 means the original investors get
the short end right? why would they agree to this acquisition? or do they get
money back, and tax-payers cover the losses?

~~~
btian
Shareholders get will nothing, but debt holders will still get paid in
proportion of how much they're owed.

~~~
eldavido
Incorrect.

The law varies state-by-state but the actual process is closer to the
following:

(1) Company agrees to file for bankruptcy, usually because they feel it's in
the owners' (shareholders) best interest to do so, in terms of recovering as
much as possible from the "bad" company, vs. trying to keep the company
running.

(2) Company's management comes up with a plan to distribute company's assets
(cash, servers, IP, whatever) more or less "fairly" among the creditors. A big
part of this is preventing management from giving a sweetheart deal on
something worth a lot, to their friend/relative/whoever (e.g. selling the
customer list for $1 to their friend's company), vs. making sure everyone who
has a claim on said assets can get the most back as possible. A lot of
arguments happen here, this is the main point of the rdio situation, whether
the sale to Pandora is the best possible outcome for everyone.

(3) The company's assets get distributed as follows:

Employees -- most states give employees' unpaid wages preferential treatment
in bankruptcy, under the same legal doctrine of why employees can't be held
civilly liable (sued) doing something under control of their employer --
employers have a general duty to care for/protect their employees. (Note that
neither the high priority bankruptcy payment, nor the liability protection,
applies to contractors. Keep this in mind next time you think contractors are
"overpaid" earning 2x as much as a W2, on top of the fact that they get no
benefits and have to pay both sides of FICA)

Secured creditors -- any creditor whose claim is "secured" or "backed up" by
some kind of asset, e.g. mortgage lenders.

Unsecured creditors -- 1099 contractors, lessors, all vendors, debenture
(bond) holders, basically anyone who claims they're "owed" by the company.

And finally, lastly, equity holders (stockholders). They don't necessary have
to get zero, but often do, because they're so far down the list of who gets
paid (what investment bankers call "capital structure seniority" \-- they're
very junior).

So yes, it might be more or less ratable within each class, but there's no
guarantee that "shareholders will get nothing", nor is it strictly
proportional.

This is the garbage collection of capitalism and I find it fascinating.

------
Grue3
This is what will happen to every single streaming service eventually. It's
hard to believe that 10 years down the line Apple Music, or Spotify, or Google
whatever-it's-called-now will still be a thing.

If you really like listening to music, make sure you either have it as
physical media, or stored on your hard drive (yes, I still buy and rip CDs
myself).

------
badmadrad
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.

~~~
Wingman4l7
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.

------
mkent
I've put together my own simple rdio -> Google play music migration:
[https://gist.github.com/mdkent/9d48a4142362a2815b09](https://gist.github.com/mdkent/9d48a4142362a2815b09)

------
bndw
Sad to hear this- I've been a paying Rdio customer for a few years now and
have been thrilled with the service overall.

Given the alternatives, I'll likely attempt purchasing albums from Amazon, or
another DRM-free alternative.

------
_djo_
This is really disappointing, Rdio was one of the few music streaming services
legally available in South Africa.

It's pretty much just Deezer and Apple Music left now. Google Play Music,
Pandora and Spotify are all region-locked.

------
jonah
Super bummed. I've been a subscriber from the very beginning. Loved their
interfaces and service far more than any of the alternatives.

(Though these days 90% of my Rdio listening is through Sonos, but still it
worked great.)

You'll be missed.

------
tibbydude
Looks like we are going to switch over the kids to Apple Music for Android
when it is stable enough. Rdio was at least available in South Africa unlike
Google Play Music and Spotify.

------
dioltas
And I just switched from Spotify to rdio. What timing!

------
bananaoomarang
Honestly, if Spotify had a redesign I don’t think there’d be another choice.

------
jacquesm
What assets do they have worth $75M?

~~~
antidaily
75,000 Aeron chairs.

------
narrator
Music is a dying industry because there's too much good free music floating
around. Look at labels like
[http://www.ektoplazm.com/](http://www.ektoplazm.com/) . The music is 100%
free. There's not even a buy button anywhere. Long distance phone calls and
music are a glimpse of our future where things are too cheap to meter. The
dying industries are trying to find ways to create artificial scarcity to go
back to the old way of doing things.

~~~
autarch
It makes sense that there'd be free options for a genre like trance or other
electronica that can be made by one person on a computer.

However, if you enjoy music that features live instruments I just don't see
how it could be free. There's too many people involved who need to eat.

~~~
cookiecaper
Whether you want it to be free or not, it's effectively impossible to enforce
scarcity over resources that can be trivially digitized. People don't pay for
music anymore because it's very easy and low-risk to get it without paying for
it, and the internet guarantees it's going to stay that way. Even if you can
get everyone to pay for Google Music, that's $10/mo from someone who used to
spend $20/CD and potentially bought several of those each month.

The fact is that it's now much harder to collect money for musical recordings.
I don't think anything is going to change about that.

~~~
dexterdog
But so many $10/month people are people like I am who rarely buy new stuff and
just listen to older stuff and the radio. I listen to music a lot, but most of
the bands I prefer have ceased to exist for a while. That being said, I don't
subscribe to any services because I'm cheap and I hate the way I can't get
everything I want in once place so I run off of my own storage.

