Rdio Opening Streaming Music To All Who Will Pay

For music streaming in the US, most of us already use Pandora, or are waiting for the eventual US release of Spotify.  The difference being that Pandora allows you to stream music based on the song or artist, and it’s all music that’s decided to be similar by Pandora.  Spotify, on the other hand, let’s you choose what song or album you want to listen to, and essentially becomes a music library in the cloud.  We may not have Spotify quite yet, but anyone who wants it can now sign up for a similar service, Rdio. {GigaOM}

Rdio is almost exactly like Spotify, it’s a platform for streaming music from the cloud.  Rdio has about 7 million songs, and is continuing to add more.  The music can be streamed via web browser, an Adobe AIR desktop app, or a mobile app.  Streaming to the mobile apps does cost more, $10 a month as opposed to $5 a month for just desktop streaming.  Rdo also allows users to create playlists or “save” music to their collection for easier access.

Today Rdio is finally opening the doors to those who weren’t able to secure an invitation.  After playing with the service for about a month, it can be worthwhile to some.  Being able to access almost any song you want from Rdio makes it a nice service to have.  Also, having that access on a smartphone is spectacular, so you don’t have to take up all your storage space with music you may not always listen to.  For those who listen to a lot of music, and tend to just hit the shuffle button on a 5000+ iTunes library, Rdio is a nice experiment, and a great way to try out new music, but it falls a bit short.  Unless you want to create a huge playlist with all songs you have in a library, there’s no way to just play through a collection.  At just $5 a month for the desktop version, it is worth trying fora one month test drive though.