Social music service Rdio, which was founded by two of the same people that started Skype, has reached version 1.0 for the iPhone on the iTunes App Store, sporting a new “springboard” style dashboard (rather than tabs) and further refinements, making the the North America-based subscription music service noticeably more Ping-like. The new version features one-touch access to new releases and recommended albums, along with an improved search and persistant player.
Rdio boasts a library of eight million songs, any of which can be listened to — even offline — for subscription rates starting at $5 per month ($10 a month for mobile users). Users can keep track of what their friends or followers are listening to, buying or recommending. Users can upload a list of the contents of their iTunes library to the service for “matching,” meaning Rdio will make the same songs and similar material most accessible as part of the streaming subscription.
Users can optionally create playlists of songs they’d like to listen to, and the service can pre-fetch them for offline listening, and of course users can buy songs outright if they desire. The offline listening option can be set to sync over Wi-Fi only to avoid the costly data rates of 3G.
The iPhone app requires iOS 3.1.3 or later — it is compatible with the iPad but not optimized for it, the developers caution.
