More on how to use Rdio

Playlists

Playlists offer the ultimate flexibility — it’s the modern version of a mix-tape. You can make your own Duran Duran “Greatest Hits” album — it’s just called a playlist instead of an album. You can have as many songs on your playlist as you want: “My favorite 50 Duran Duran songs” or “My favorite 500 songs”.

A song can be on as many different playlists as needed.
I have a couple standard playlists. The one I listen to the most:

• “Dark”: Whenever I find something new (or old) that I like a lot I put it here. I usually keep it around 20 songs. After I get tired of something I move it to one of the following playlists for old favorites.

When I run into an old favorite I’ll put it onto a playlist organized by decade. That’s because it tends to be a “objective” way for me to organize songs. The answer to “is this rock or alternative” seems to change day-to-day for me.

• “60’s”
• “70’s”
• “80’s”
• “90’s”
• “naughts” (2000’s)
• “10’s”

I have a few playlists for occasions:

• “Pre-Dinner” for before a dinner party
• “At Dinner” while eating
• “Post Dinner” for some louder, funner music.
• “Sunday Morning” some classical music

I have a playlist that I just dump stuff on to listen to later:

• “Try This”

You can also just add music to your “Up Next” list. More about that later.
Then I have some silly project playlists:

• “Sidereal Days” I was collecting songs from a book about the early days of Rock&Roll
• “NYC” Songs about New York City.

Feel free to create playlists however you like to think about music. You are no longer bound by the constraints of the album.

I’ve used Rdio for the past half-year and thought I’d explain how it works. I also had Spotify for a similar amount of time before switching to Rdio. They are very similar; I liked Rdio more.

You rent music from Rdio for about $10/month (I’m paying $18 for my wife and me plus another $5 for my son). We each get unlimited music and downloads. We each have separate accounts. Really! You can download thousands of songs to your iPhone, iTouch, or other smart phones. Obviously, you can only download limited by storage capacity. I do that for music I listen to regularly so it keeps working while I’m on the subway. If music is not already stored on my device it is streamed so you can always listen to more music.
When you stop paying you lose access to the music.
You can download an app for you Mac — for some reason I tend to prefer desktop apps. Probably some outdated notion that desktop apps are more capable then a web based interface — not so true given the number of people that use web based interfaces.

The web interface is pretty similar to the app. It’s nice because you can use it without installing any software so it’s much easier to use a work.