Farewell Rdio

The news about Rdio shutting down have been unexpected. It's always sad when a company building great products closes down. And even though I am working at Spotify, I still want to see good competitors, both smaller and bigger, that make everyone else strive for improving. All in the benefit of users.

Those of us who work with the web are thankful to the existence of multiple browsers, that have result in a healthy race for implementing more features and delivering better performance, pushing the web forward.

Rdio had a snappy and beautiful clean web player that I envied, a web playback API that allowed lots of nice integrations, and a very complete REST API that returned information like song play count, blurry background image and dominant colour for cover arts, which not many other streaming services expose.

I think they have also done a good job communicating their closure. Their farewell page, with a friendly language, nicely designed, showing a brief but to-the-point timeline, is a good reminder of some of the values of Rdio. Especial kudos also to the export instructions, making it easy for users to keep their collection.

I guess, after all, good products not necessarily mean good business, and vice versa. Let's hope the best for the people in Rdio in their new journey with Pandora.

Goodbye ... for now.