Online music streaming service and Spotify-rival Rdio has launched a new subscription plan that offers one of the cheapest ways to stream music in the US without listening to ads.
Rdio Select costs just $3.99 per month and lets you listen to ad-free streaming music stations based on artist, song, genre, or other criteria. You can also download some music for offline listening… but there’s a pretty big limit on just how much music you can download.
Rdio Select subscribers can download up to 25 songs on a mobile device. Want to replace the music on your phone or tablet? You can do that… but you can only download up to 25 songs per day.
Still, Rdio Select is actually $1 per month cheaper than Pandora One, a service that offers ad-free personalized radio streaming, but no downloads at all. And it’s a lot cheaper than the $9.99 per month you’d normally pay for a full-featured, ad-free, on-demand music service like Rdio Unlimited, Spotify Premium, or Google Play Music All Access.
Or you could just put up with ads and use the free versions of Spotify, Rdio, or Pandora.
Now that Grooveshark is gone, there’s one less semi-legal alternative for free and ad-free music.
via Rdio
Google Music was my streaming provider of choice, but as of yesterday they removed the 5-star rating system in favour of binary thumbs up/down. There is a lot of rage going on https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/play/HwKmVF5N5YA but I bet Google won’t undo this. Does anyone of you know a streaming service where I can rate the songs properly?
Spotify Free has been a big disappointment. You could play whatever song you wanted in the past with ads. Now, you cannot play whatever song you want. You have to make a playlist and it shuffle plays it, so you may not get the song you want right away.