I decided to give rdio a try. I like to take a look at music consumption systems as they come out. Of all the systems I have tried, I believe that if this one survives it will be the future. For about $10 US a month you have unlimited access to everything in their library. At first you are probably thinking this is a lot like Rhapsody from Real. Now add an iPhone app that lets you select music to store for offline playing and things get even more interesting for me. On top of that add a system where you can follow other people to see what music they like, and you can collaborate on playlists.

The people who will dislike this service will say that they don't get to keep any music if they cancel service or the company goes under. These are negatives, but my music folder on my laptop is 88Gb in size. I imagine if you love music then yours is probably similar. Backing up all that data is a headache. Why should I have to? It's 2010 already. Isn't everything supposed to be in the cloud now? Rdio brings us there. For the cost of 12 albums a year you get access to TONS of albums, and their library seems really good. I found pretty much every song I looked for. And if you want to buy a song then rdio will sell it to you for $1.30/track or you could always buy from Amazon or iTunes.

I always thought there would be a future where for a small cost I could access any music I wanted, from anywhere I wanted, and not be left with tracks I'm later tired of but I don't want to delete because I paid for them. How many songs are in your library that you never listen to, but you don't want to dump them because you paid for them? How many songs have you not been able to listen to because you couldn't budget the money to buy them? The future is here, and I love that I can appreciate it fully because once upon a time I had a stack of vinyl records that were later replaced by cassette tapes only to be replaced again by CDs. Replacing the CDs with digital downloads still didn't solve the problem that I had to deal with storing all this data. Thank you rdio for hopefully being the last place I will get music, at least until money goes away like in Star Trek. :)

If you want to see what music I listen to then visit my page; http://www.rdio.com/people/jlevitsk