• A miscellany of interesting things, collected or written by Oli Watts.

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    • 3 reasons why Spotify lost my business, and Rdio won it. July 1st

    I love Spotify. It provided the music at our wedding party and kept me company on the many, torturous commutes between Colchester and London.

    Paying £9.99 every month for access to almost every music track I could want has revolutionised the way I listen to music more that the iTunes Music Store ever did.

    Despite this, I find that Spotify has some flaws which have become extremely grating:

    Wasted space in the Spotify mobile app. By cellanr on Flickr

    1. It has the worst mobile app ever. There’s no discussion necessary about this. It’s abysmal. I could write 10 entire posts about it, from the pointless ‘beamed notes’ that appear next to EVERY playlist taking up valuable UI space, the inability to reorganise playlists, the fact the app has to ‘load’ every time it launches…
    2. The ‘playlists’ concept is broken. Some people may have hours to meticulously sort their music into mood-balanced playlists. I don’t. I want to be able to find an artist or album quickly, and play it. With Spotify on mobile, I can’t. I have to create a playlist — which is then place in a long, unsearchable list.
    3. Synced music doesn’t stay synched. If I’ve spent time (and data) waiting for music to download to my phone, it should stay there. Spotify takes an opposite view, randomly deleting gigabytes of music, perhaps just because it feels like it.

    As a desktop app, Spotify works beautifully. It needs a consistent, reliable connection to the internet and lots of screen real estate where you can search for everything and organise playlists. When I’m on mobile, I just don’t have these things.

    Rdio’s iPhone app is much nicer. By Luxury Luke on Flickr.

    Fortunately, there’s an alternative. Rdio.

    A similar system to Spotify, Rdio is priced exactly the same as Spotify and has a better selection of music (for my tastes). Ultimately it wins for these three reasons:

    1. It automatically syncs my music. Wherever I’m listening I can mark an album as ‘sync to mobile’ and it’ll download it to my iPhone and iPad. Simple.
    2. I can browse music. I don’t have to search for everything. Rdio allows you to add music to your ‘Collection’ – and automatically organises it by Album or Artist so I can find it in a context that makes sense to me. I can create playlists if I want to too, but crucially I don’t have to search for everything.
    3. I can choose to only see music I’ve downloaded. I can easily access the music I’ve chosen to always have with me.

    Best of all, you can try Rdio for free for 7 days. Do it, you’ll love it.

    13 Replies · Tweet · · Link

    ~



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    • Frank Wimmer

      Great article. I completely agree. I’ve been an Rdio subscriber for over a year. Once Spotify started up here in the States, I decided to give it a try after all the raves from my UK friends.

      Based on all I’d heard, I assumed it must somehow be even better than Rdio. Wrong! I *hated* Spotify. The UI sucked and the mysterious synced/not synced issue was the proverbial nail in the coffin.

      • Oli

        Thanks Frank, really glad you liked the post :)

    • ells

      point 3) agreed
      point 1 & 2) how old is your spotify client? That screenshot is very old.
      Current version, i’m straight in and playing tracks i’ve searched for.

      Nevertheless, will check out rdio, thx for the tip.

      • Oli

        Agree the screenshot is old, but the UI hasn’t changed, certainly around the areas I’m interested in. Hope you enjoy Rdio :)

    • http://blog.charlespinker.com Charlie P

      I’m tossing and turning over switching to Rdio from Spotify, which for me too revolutionised my music listening. I love that Rdio lets me have my ‘collection’ online as opposed to Spotify’s insistance that Playlists is the only way to listen to music.

      I would say that your screenshot is waaaay out of date and the UI IS different now. The mobile client is really good, especially on iPad. You want to really see the worst mainstream mobile client? Just load up Facebook on iOS. The client has regularly told me I’m using offline playlists on more than 3 devices (which I’m not, at least not intentionally), and then proceeds to delete my entire offline catalogue.

      Rdio is missing one of my favourite albums which is a pain but its a relatively weird one I admit.

      Am thinking of making the switch for a month and seeing how it goes.

      • Oli

        Thanks Charlie, really appreciate your comments :)

        Agree on the screenie, but the UX hasn’t changed that much if the design has.

        I find Rdio fits better how I listen to music. It seems