Rdio vs. Spotify

In a previous post I discussed the growing shift of music listeners from owning to streaming their music.  Now I'm going to take a quick look at what I would consider to be the two best streaming services.  I have used both Rdio and Spotify over the past year and they both have their advantages.  The good thing is that the competition between them will make better products for us.  I am currently using Rdio after about 8 months with Spotify; switching because of the Rdio desktop client refresh.  

One nice advantage to these services is that they both have free plans, which in my case, means I can switch between the two premium plans as I feel like without losing my settings, etc.

Rdio has recently released a new desktop client that has been dramatically improved from the previous version.  It took a lot of queues from Spotify and iTunes giving you quicker access to features and playlists in the left column.  It has also improved the social aspect showing you quickly which of your friends have listened to specific albums or songs.

Spotify's desktop on the other hand has remained fairly constant with the exception of the new Spotify Apps feature.  This is a great feature that allows third party developers to create custom apps within the Spotify interface.  Apps like Rolling Stone which give you access to the lists that the magazine has assembled over the years.   Billboard offers all of the top 100 lists for the variety of genres.  There are over a dozen apps now, and they provide a lot of functionality for the Spotify desktop, which in my eyes adds a lot of value.

I would say that in general, before Rdio's update I preferred Spotify's desktop experience.  It seemed quicker, more responsive, simpler, and just more comfortable.  But Rdio's new app made things much simpler, and user friendly, and I'm enjoying using this new app very much, though I would say it is still not as responsive as Spotify.  

Some things I am still missing from Spotify are the apps, and the flexibility of mobile syncing.  Spotify's user base is also much larger making it better for interacting with friends.  Spotify's audio quality seems to be a bit better as well.  While they both say they are using high bit-rates, the highs and lows of Rdio seem to be lacking a bit.  Rdio does say on their site that they are constantly adjusting the compression of the music to make things as good as possible. Rdio's app is much more album centric.  It makes it easy to listen to whole albums, and organize these albums in your collection.  While it certainly isn't difficult to listen to albums on Spotify, the app in general is much more focused on individual songs and not so much what album they belong to.  As someone who appreciates a complete album listening experience I like Rdio's album centric interface.

Spotify's catalog claims to be much larger than Rdio's, however I will say of the songs I listen to there are about the same number of missing tracks in both apps compared to the other.  So this is pretty much a wash.

While the mobile apps are quite different from each other, I wouldn't say I prefer one greatly over the other.  Spotify's app is very simplistic, just showing your your play lists, which is nice for quickly listening to music, but Rdio's app has more "features" and is a basically their desktop compressed for the iPhone.  

Both apps run into problems if your streaming through air play, but I believe it relates to a problem with the phone itself.  After you begin streaming, and say... put the phone back in your pocket, it will only last about a song or two before cutting out.  I did a fair amount of research and determined that this is due to the phone switching off wi-fi back to the cell network.  Obviously this would terminate the local wi-fi air play connection.  But this is unfortunate as it would be really nice to play on the stereo via phone.  Luckily there is the iPad.

One big advantage Rdio has is that they actually a provide an iPad app (now in HD).  I use air play a great deal.  Basically anytime I want to listen to music on the home stereo.  Using an iPad (wi-fi only) I can stream music consistently without interruption.  With Spotify you can use the iPhone app, upscaled, but this isn't too pretty.  

Rdio on the other hand has a very functional iPad app, that acts a lot like the desktop client.  Spotify has said on multiple occasions that getting an iPad app out is one of their top priorities, but as of the writing of this article, no app yet.  This is a pretty important feature that Rdio has upper hand on in my book.

So this is my assessment after a almost a year of usage.  Both platforms will continue to change and "one up" the other, but hopefully both are around for the long haul. If you have additional considerations or features I forgot to mention leave a comment and let me know.  

Thanks.