Is Rdio the Return of the Album?
Rdio, a new (legit) online music streaming service, may change the way we listen to music. Not a novel concept necessarily, and we’ll find that iTunes will be quickly bringing their own version next year, but it’s part of a new chapter in listening to music.
The service is simply a large online catalog of music you can search and listen to whatever, whenever, wherever you want from a data or internet connection, with a focus on community music discovery through “following” friends. The kicker is that it offers downloading for offline listening as well. The bigger kicker is that it’s only $9.99 a month.
The iPhone (and Android/Blackberry) app is great. If I think of an album or band, and add the whole thing to my collection and start listening like it’s in my iPod library. The selection is pretty strong as well.
Why it may save the album
The album is dead…long live the album. With records, it was too much effort really to skip around precisely, so a straight through listen was the norm. Tapes offered an opportunity to skip songs and make mixes for the first time, and the CD allowed any song, whenever you wanted.
With Napster and then iTunes, the focus is now on singles. Record stores are dead, discovery is online now, not by listening to hours of music with your friends and enjoying an entire album. While Rdio is similar to Pandora, I have used it to listen to the rest of albums I didn’t want to front the cash to hear beyond the top two singles.
The album may be a dead artform. Writing singles changes music significantly instead of taking in a symphony with a beginning, middle, and end, it’s like peeking your head through the curtains during a performance and judging a band on what you saw there.
Regardless of the opportunity Rdio and other similar systems may allow to enjoy those compilations, it is a great service, always going as it is on my home system, on my phone when I’m jogging, and in my car streaming. There’s a 3 day trial, and if you use it, you’ll be hooked.
