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Rdio to Shut Down, Assets to Be Acquired by Pandora

The latest casualty of the music streaming wars is Rdio, which will be filing for bankruptcy and winding down its service. If the bankruptcy goes through, streaming radio service Pandora will be purchasing “key assets” from Rdio for $75 million (but not the service as a whole) and many members of the Rdio team will be offered positions at Pandora. (Where Rdio enabled users to play any song or album in its collection on demand, Pandora users can only create stations based on song or artist — users have no advance control over what plays.)

In a blog post announcing the news, Rdio said:

Rdio’s service will not be interrupted today. We will have more updates in the coming weeks on what this process means for your Rdio account, but for the time being the service continues unchanged.

We can hope that Rdio will provide customers with ways of exporting collections and playlists, or even ways of transferring them to competing services like Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Play Music. Searching for independent export-import services will reveal quite a number, but I have yet to find anything that works for moving to Spotify or Google Play Music (I have no interest in using Apple Music because of the overloaded iTunes interface; see “Retuning Rdio: Why I Dropped Apple Music,” 7 October 2015).

The one functional utility I have found is the Chrome extension Rdio Enhancer, which adds an Export to CSV button to your Rdio Favorites screen, and an Extras > Export to CSV submenu to the More button in playlists. Just install the extension in Google Chrome, log in to the Rdio Web site, click Favorites, and click Export to CSV. That gets you a comma-separated-values text file listing every track in your collection, and even if you can’t import it elsewhere easily, you at least have a list from which to work manually.



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