Head Tale

After a few days of focus on Paris and the serious issues of the world, time to get back to my First World Problems (which are defined by Google as: “a relatively trivial or minor problem or frustration, implying a contrast with serious problems such as those that may be experienced in the developing world.”)

That’s true but this one is a doozy.

Rdio.com, a streaming music site I’ve belonged to for about three years and where I’ve spent hours and hours of my life adding albums and songs to my library, curating that music and creating playlists, is being bought out by Pandora, a much larger streaming service.  But Pandora is buying Rdio mostly for their intellectual property/staff/assets and has said that they have no plans to continue the Rdio service in any form – as is or even modified.

That sucks.

I mean, there are tonnes of other similar services – Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, Google Music, Rhapsody/Napster, etc. etc. – all with their advantages and disadvantages.

But the thing is that music is personal and I’d gotten *very* used to how Rdio worked and it sucks to think about re-learning another system, not to mention trying to re-create all of the aspects of my account that I’ve built slowly over the past three years (though there are some sites popping up to help with the process at least.)

Spotify is looking like it’ll be my new musical home but even though it has more subscribers, it’s seen as an inferior yet more successful competitor.  Plus I’ve screwed that up too. Generally, I have a policy of *never* joining a web site using my Facebook account if there’s an option to create one with username/password.  But for some stupid reason (well, since Spotify was US-only at the time and I never thought there’d be a day when I’d be looking to switch), I broke my own rule and created a Spotify account with Facebook during a trip to the US in 2012.

Again, not the end of the world but since there’s no (easy) way to switch back to my preferred log-in method (at least if I want to keep the account connected to my preferred e-mail and user name), that sucks too (to the point that I might consider a different service – Deezer is intriguing – on that basis alone!)

I don’t know – the whole thing is the definition of a first world problem – but this news has really thrown me for a loop today if you can believe it.