Meh? Large scale storage on Internet servers has been around since the '90s. Dropbox is important because of the user experience, which iCloud doesn't really address. You think the Windows client for iCloud is going to be as seamless as Dropbox? I bet the difference is so big my mom can articulate it.
Not sure if Rdio's been smoted. I mean, I can get any song I want at any time on any device with rdio for a low monthly price. iTunes is still charging me to own songs, and my selection is still bound by the storage capacity of my device.
RDio is still a much better option than iTunes, Google Music or the Amazon music locker, IMO.
Rdio is still a great deal if you're the kind of person who listens to Yeasayer or Joan As Police Woman. It is no longer as good a deal for the kind of person who listens to Fleetwood Mac and Lady Gaga. The problem is, there are way more of the latter than the former.
More importantly, Rdio already had a lot of noise it had to spend money to cut through. What happens to their cost of customer acquisition after iCloud and iTunes Match?
I just don't see how they're remotely close to the same thing. But opinions are opinions -- Rdio combines the ease of discovery of a service like Pandora with the selection of a decent music store. And that it can locally cache songs on a device means, well, why would I ever buy songs on iTunes again.
Granted, I have terrible taste in music (TERRIBLE), and maybe somebody who is a bit more sophisticated will have a better experience with iTunes. For me though, Rdio answers the desire: I can listen to any song I want wherever I want whenever I want, with one flat monthly fee.
iTunes can't do that. With iTunes, I can listen to a song I want, between 5-20 minutes from now, unless I've purchased it already. And synced it. Cloud or computer, what's dumb about apple's solution is that as far as I know, they haven't taken the sync out of the equation. You're just syncing with the cloud rather than your computer.
As a mostly-satisfied Rdio subscriber, I'm happy to be wrong about this, but I think Apple just put a shotgun blast through 80% of the "cloud music" market. I think people who really see value in getting instant access to any music every year is a small subset of the whole digital music market.
3Months Rdio User: What I hate about rdio is music disappearance. License changes. Hopefully apple has a stronger relationship and a full song won't go 30 seconds as fast as rdio's does
I use rdio, and it's not the streaming that makes me keep paying them--it's the legal access to a mountainous library of most of the music I ever have a reason to give a listen to.
I will probably keep paying Rdio, but I also recognize that I am in a minority of listeners that constantly listens to new stuff.
Before this announcement, Rdio had a huge value proposition even for normal people: instant access to all the music in their collection from multiple devices. Now iTMS has the same offering, for less money, and with better integration into every platform normal people play music on.
Rdio will undoubtably be faster at delivering a "random song", that is, one that's not already downloaded to your device.
Often times I'll be somewhere remote and want to listen to an album I haven't listened to in months. Without having to download each file first, Rdio starts playing instantly.
I'd actually argue that now that Apple's trajectory wrt cloud music is pretty clear, Rdio and MOG probably are breathing a bit easier that they can fill a niche without worrying about iTMS just outright replacing them.
Rdio did not just get "smote", IMO. Without streaming, my desire to use iTunes matching or iCloud for music in general is lacking. Streaming is where it's at, for me.
Rdio, on the other hand, just got smote.