Rdio on Monday unveiled a revamped version of its music-streaming service intended to provide a more visually appealing interface that's easier to navigate.
Subscribers have had access to this "new Rdio" since March, when the company took the wraps off a beta version of the upgrade at SXSW. But as of Monday night, all users – free and paid – were switched over to the revamped Rdio.
"It was too easy for people to get lost in the vast information architecture of a service with 15 million songs, millions of artists, and a lot of people who they follow," Malthe Sigurdsson, vice president of Rdio product design, said in a recent interview. "So we needed to make the overall navigation hierarchy and architecture better."
New Rdio adds much-requested features like drag-and-drop playlist creation and private playlists, a static left-hand bar, and a bigger focus on discovery. Sigurdsson said Rdio thinks of the service as an app, "so we wanted to make sure the service felt like an application even though it runs in a browser."
Rdio got its start in 2010 under the direction of Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. It is now available in the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Portugal and Denmark, and was recently launched in the U.K. and France. The firm is currently led by CEO Drew Larner (above, right), a former Twentieth Century Fox exec, and co-founder Carter Adamson (left), former head of product at Skype. PCMag sat down with Larner and Adamson recently to talk about how the online music space has evolved, what's next for Rdio, and more.
PCMag: What's the one thing we should know about new Rdio?
Drew Larner: In general, I think we've just made it easier and more intuitive to do what we've focused on from the beginning, which is discovering music through people. I thought it was very powerful the way we did it the first time around, but I think we just improved upon it with the redesign in terms of how you follow people, how you see what people are doing, in terms of the interaction, and how the UI works.
PCMag: What do you hope to accomplish with the revamp?
Drew Larner: It's been a constant process of constantly tweaking [Rdio] and making it better. This is a more global change, but you know, we push out changes all the time and the goal is to just keep improving on what we think is the best experience out there for consumption of music.
PCMag: How do you decide which requested features to include?
Drew Larner: I think it's a litany of things, and it's sort of figuring out how best to respond. Because people have comments all the time, as you would imagine. It's a savvy group of users who are interested in improving their experience. But I think it's collectively on the product team side figuring out what is most important, and layering that in as best we can.
PCMag: How do you differentiate yourself from rivals like Spotify or MOG?
Drew Larner: It goes back to what I mentioned earlier as far as social discovery. We think that music is intrinsically social, but not social in the sense of … Facebook and having all your friends and your grandmother and your college roommate [weigh in on music]. But more around people who you believe can provide an interesting window into what they're doing from a music standpoint and creating a great way for people to discover music. It's something we feel we've done from day one and continued to improve upon and we believe it's truly unique.
Carter Adamson: I think social is definitely one [aspect], but where we shine is really the discovery piece vis-a-vis the other services. We hear comments like, "I discovered more music in the past two days on Rdio than in the past few decades of my life" virtually every week, which is really one of the main reasons why we started this service. Because we noticed a lot of people kind of giving up on music entirely after college because they simply didn't have enough time to go to the shows and read the magazines and talk to the people they needed to talk to. They had their 40 CDs and the radio and that was good enough. So we really feel and are seeing from comments and press that we've unlocked music again for people in a very fun and easy, seamless way. It has excited people and brought people back to music.
So, social is one [way to differentiate], and I think the other detail, which Drew alluded to, is we take the Twitter approach. Generally, the people I'm following on Facebook, there's maybe a few people I want to know what they're listening to, but generally those aren't the people I'm following to discover new music. Ninety-seven percent of the people I'm following on Rdio, I've actually never met before. I've never talked to them, but they just happen to have excellent taste in a particular genre or sub-genre or they happen to like the same band I like. But again, I don't know 97 percent of the people I'm following on Rdio just like I don't know most of the people I'm following on Twitter. The reason I'm following these people is because they're very specific curators of things I'm interested in, and that's not the way that Facebook works. And so, that's why we're different in that respect.
I think the other big reason is obviously the experience we come to the table with – a lot of experience with not only consumer software services in generally, but specifically the music-streaming space. A lot of our engineers actually come from imeem, which was the world's biggest music-streaming service at one point. And we are incredibly focused on delivering the best experience out there. That's almost all we care about and we are in this for the long haul, we're in this to do a truly global music service – the world's first, really. We're the only ones out there who've actually rolled out a global consumer business. We've actually been in business with most of the telecoms through Skype before and really have these relationships. We know what it takes to go into most of these countries, and so we have the experience as well to roll out a truly global service.
Continue Reading: Discovery and the evolving music space
PCMag: You mentioned having the edge in terms of discovery. What sort of tools does Rdio provide?
Carter Adamson: There are a number of tools. As I said before, it sort of works on a basic level like Twitter. You follow people, we suggest people for you to follow on the cold start, first day, either they're popular people on the service or they're relevant to stuff you've been playing and stuff we think you might be interested in. You can also discover people and new music through just listening to stuff you like on the service. So if you like the Rolling Stones or Beck, you can see other people or top fans of those bands and see who else has put those songs in their playlists and see who they're following.
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And then we also have algorithmic recommendations for music as well, so if you want to just sit there and punch the lottery machine and see recommendations on stuff that you might like to listen to, you can do it that way as well.
PCMag: How has online music space has evolved since you got into the business?
Carter Adamson: In general, if you've followed the music industry, it's always closely tied to the playback device and the thing that's interesting about now is you have an explosion of connected devices that are effectively playback devices. Anything that can talk to the Internet is a playback device. And you have mainstream consumers with a lot of these things now in their life. It's not just an early-adopter crew, it's moms and dads with tablets and apps and smartphones, and even connected radios and TV. But suddenly it doesn't make sense for you to buy a bunch of a la carte downloads and manually port them around to all of your connected devices. The only thing that makes sense is the access model. So, I think that's a recent development and the first problem: giving people truly seamless access to their content, whether it be music or TV or books or film. And then, the next problem is, I have access to everything now, how do I make sense of it? I think the tack we've taken and others have followed has been, the most logical way to discover stuff is through people you trust – [or] taking the Twitter model of discovery and prioritization.
PCMag: Are people more accepting of online-music services and willing to subscribe?
Carter Adamson: I think absolutely, there's been a ton of press written about this space. There's a lot of excitement around it. It's like a behavioral shift; once you try it, the response is always the same – why haven't I always been doing it this way? It's just getting mainstream consumers over that conceptual hump of 'This is another music service, I already have iTunes or I use Pandora or I just don't do anything and listen to music in the car, why do I need this?' But once they get over that hump, the reaction is, 'Oh it's the same.' So it's really about education at this time. I think people are definitely at that tipping point. We're certainly seeing it in our numbers.
PCMag: What about the music labels?
Carter Adamson: They were big believers from the beginning, and have been very supportive throughout. It wasn't something that they had to eventually come around to.
PCMag: Has creating an app for Facebook helped with uptake?
Carter Adamson: Absolutely. I think that's one of the macro trends also. The traffic has consolidated to a few places on the Internet – Facebook definitely being one of those main hubs. Their usage and engagement is incredible and it's a hugely important pool for us of users.
PCMag: Is Rdio available via any other services?
Carter Adamson: We're the only one who is natively baked into Twitter – if you tweet, our embedded player actually pops us into the service. We also have a wide array of embeddable, customizable players that are around the Web in various shapes and forms.
PCMag: What's the most popular way to consume Rdio?
Carter Adamson: By far, the most popular tier is the mobile tier. And I think that points to the fact that the core proposition has always been about seamless mobility, and I think one could argue credibly that piracy was started simply because seamless mobility wasn't there. And, no one has ever bought a song on iTunes to just play it on their computer.
Drew Larner: Ninety percent of our base is on the mobile plan.
PCMag: What do you hope to accomplish with Rdio in the next year?
Drew Larner: I would say that it's the continuation of the global expansion. Our goal is to be a global service. Carter spoke about Skype and the success that our founders and Carter … had there. And we want to try to do something similar. Again, totally different space and different product, but the idea of being able to leverage off this concept of social discovery by being able to follow people [is key]. For instance, we're in Brazil, we're in Australia, we're in Germany and being able to follow someone who's doing something interesting in Berlin and someone in Sydney and someone in Rio, we think that will continue to build on itself as we continue to launch in new territories and really deliver on this notion of social discovery on a global basis.
PCMag: Finally, what gadgets do you have in your pocket?
Drew Larner: I'm one of the few BlackBerry users in the company because I can't get off that keyboard. And we do have a BlackBerry app and that's good, but I do get a lot of grief as you would imagine in a technology company.
Carter Adamson: I'm firmly planted in the iOS world of devices that just work.
For more, see PCMag's full review of the updated Rdio and slideshow above.
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