Music a la Carte – Rdio.com
23 Monday Jan 2012
Written by Jo Bossart/ParrySounds.com in Sounds, Suggestions
It’s not often you come across a service good enough that you want recommend it to others. I have found one – Rdio.com.
This is an online music service, available in Canada, that provides access to almost all music over the past 50 years. There are some exceptions, you won’t find the Beatles or Led Zeppelin, but they have the full catalogue of the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and almost all of the artists from the last 50 years. They have lots and lots of jazz, rap, punk and rock. Name the genre and they have it. You are able to play the full album, it’s not a song here and a song there. Unlike Pandora, USA only, you select everything you want to listen to.
The cost is about $6 per month for unlimited streaming. For $11 per month you can also get it on your mobile phone. The quality is good, about 192 kbps. Most of what you listen to on any type of mobile device is probably around 128 kbps, and the better quality downloads from iTunes are 256 kbps. In real terms it sounds great.
At 192 kbps or so an average album takes 60 MB of data. For the average Cogeco cable customer with 80 GB per month you could listen to about 1,000 albums per month and still not be over your limit.
I highly recommend you give it a try if you like music. I’m using Rdio.com to go back and catch up on the music I missed while building a career and raising a family. There was not much extra time or money to buy the albums that were popular at the time. And of course just a decade ago a CD cost $15 or so, and there was almost nowhere you could listen to a full album before you bought it.
In case you are wondering I am not receiving any type of commission or reward for promoting Rdio.com. It’s good and it a great value. Enjoy it while you can, I suspect that there will be limits placed on what you can hear and how much it costs in the years to come. But at this price it’s never too early to discover some great music.
From time-to-time I’ll point out some of my recent discoveries, or rediscoveries. Right now I’m enjoying the Moby and Kraftwerk catalogue. There are many hours of listening pleasure ahead of me. and not so long ago I listened to the CTI collection of jazz from the 60’s and 70’s featuring artists like Freddie Hubbard, Stanley Turrentine and Ron Carter.