Head Tale

“Changes” – David Bowie

Rdio, a streaming music service similar to Spotify and Pandora but which is available in Canada (at least without requiring you to use a VPN or other sorcery to appear to be an American), recently released a major upgrade to their user interface.

This was the second major change since I’d joined a few years ago and as with that one, there was a lot of pushback and outrage within the community about the changes (which probably could’ve been diffused somewhat if they’d done a few things different – warn users about the changes ahead of time instead of releasing them without any advance notice, do a better job of explaining *why* the changes on an Rdio blog – they have blogs including News and New Features but didn’t really talk about the changes beyond general, positive promotion.  Their user forums are also rarely helpful as Rdio staff replies are most often “Thanks for the feedback – we’ll pass it along to engineering” instead of true engagement.)

These changes also always bring home one of the biggest problems with a license model over a buy model for things like music (and books via Amazon and movies via NetFlix) is that you give up the control you have as an owner.

To put it another way, when I bought CD’s, I could basically do whatever I wanted with them – sometimes I wasn’t even beyond re-burning a CD so the songs were in an order I preferred or certain songs were cut out completely.  When I moved my collection to digital MP3s starting with Napster and growing since then, again I had total control of which artists I added, cataloguing information about each track, album art, etc.

With licensed music via a service like Rdio, I’m pretty much at their mercy when they change the interface or offerings.  (To be fair, getting access to millions of CDs in every kind of genre for the cost of what I used to pay for a single used CD – $9.99/month – even if there are artists I like missing and/or I can’t upload my own music that isn’t part of their service – is worth the trade-off…for the most part.)

Another problem is that any interface change often takes away existing elements.  With a subscriber base of 100,000 people (as of January 2013) there are always people who are going to miss something you move or eliminate.

So here’s my take on the good and not-so-good things about their redesign…

GOOD THINGS ABOUT THE NEW RDIO DESIGN

• They added a “Home” section which mimics every other current web service which is moving to some sort of a News Feed feature.  This blends various things such as what you’ve listened to recently, what your friends have listened to, changed playlists, trending music within your friend network and more.
• They added a “Trending” section which is a combination of what’s popular generally on the site and with your friends (at least I think that’s how it works.) 😉
• They’ve added an option to add any category of the site’s offerings as a Favourite – albums, artists, individual songs, stations.
• I didn’t use them much before but apparently they’ve greatly expanded their stations,  are adding human curation AND also allowing non-subscribers to listen to the stations for free as an enticement to join Rdio.

NOT-SO-GOOD THINGS ABOUT THE NEW RDIO DESIGN

• Playlists previously lived along the left side in the navigation section which made it super-easy to drag and drop songs onto a playlist.  They buried playlists in the re-design but must’ve had a lot of pushback about this change specifically because it’s already been returned.  What’s frustrating about things like this is this is “Web Design 101” stuff I learned back in 1997, namely “try to minimize how many clicks people have to do to get to the info they want.”  I know burying the playlists made the site look cleaner but a better solution would be to have a way to expand/collapse them on the navigation menu so those who didn’t want them cluttering their page wouldn’t have to and those who wanted quick access to playlists could have that too.
• They also removed a constantly updating list of what your friends are listening to from the right side of the site, similar to Facebook’s mini-Newsfeed.  Again, it makes for a cleaner look and you can still dig to find your Friend’s activity (now labeled “Recent Activity” rather than “Currently Listening”) but again, it’s lost that random discovery utility it had before (although if I see an Rdio friend is listening to Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On”, are we crossing in to TMI territory?) 😉
• They’ve changed “Collection” which is where you could add albums you liked to “Favourites” and now allow you add anything to this section – albums, artists, individual songs, stations.  That’s actually kinda cool except it confuses what most people think of as “Favourites”.  To put it another way, I may or may not put a Justin Bieber album in my Collection but I’d never call him a Favourite. This is another change that seemed to have an easy solution – add the option to have Favourites but leave Collections as it was.
• In the old Rdio, after you finished listening to a playlist or album, it would continue auto-playing similar songs to what you’d already been listening to.  That was usually quite good and didn’t break the mood.  Now, I think auto-play goes to playing random tracks from your entire favourites collection so you might hear a rock song followed by a comedy bit followed by an outlaw country song, one after the other.
• And since I’m kvetching, I’ll add that I *still* miss a feature that disappeared during the *last* UI update.  It used to be that you could click on any song and see what playlists it had been included on.  This could lead to other similar songs.  So if I wanted a song like “Shiny Happy People” by REM, I could click on it, see that it was included in a playlist called “Songs That Make Me Dance” then find a song by Bruno Mars I didn’t listen to then click on that song to find it on a playlist called “Great Wedding Tunes” and so on and so forth.  Such a cool feature – I still miss it!
• They still haven’t added “Shelves”.  I’d love to be able to categorize the albums I’ve added to my Collection into sub-groups – “Celtic”, “80s Rock”, “Mellow” – or whatever.

One unhappy customer summed up the problems very well in the Rdio forums…

The thing that really irks me about this update, though, isn’t so much what they’ve added as it is what they’ve taken away. If they had kept Rdio the way it was but just ADDED stations, the Home page, etc. as options, without taking away the social sidebar, the playlists in the other sidebar, the Recent Activity page, etc., I don’t think most people would be that upset. I mean, they’ve even taken away the ability to sort your playlists and collection (excuse me, “Favorites” – I realize it’s mostly semantics but I don’t like that change either) in the order you want them – who thought that was a good idea??? What music software, in 2014, doesn’t give you the option of sorting things a few different ways? Spotify lets you sort in at least four different ways. Even before the update I thought Rdio’s sorting options were insufficient (putting songs in a playlist in alphabetical order manually is a huge PITA), and then they release an update that gives you even fewer ways to sort things. Geez.