Rdio Free On Mobile, Last.fm Scrobble, Pandora Workaround

Ever since my Last.fm radio stopped working in my Chromium and Seamonkey browsers, it's been a long time since I have tuned into any online personalized music streaming service. I haven't bothered to figure out the problem. Mainly because I have been busy and also I don't like to listen to music through my browser. Before that, I had a lot of fun streaming Last.fm from my Rhythmbox desktop media player, but then the API was killed by Last.fm. This affected not only desktop clients but the Last.fm Android and iOS applications. Matthew Hawn of Last.fm announced in a blog post:

On February 15 [2011], the radio service built into Last.fm mobile apps and on home entertainment devices will become an ad-free, subscriber-only feature.

Subscribing to Last.fm is cheap, $3.00 a month, and it is very tempting. But I am cheap to.

My Last.fm Profile shown in Rhythmbox.

I preferred Last.fm to other online music services because the recommendation engine is so much more personal. This degree of personalization is primarily due to the effect of scrobbling your own music collection. Last.fm uses scrobbling to maintain user listening data. Everytime a listener listens to music on a Last.fm-enabled player such as Rhythmbox or Banshee, the tracks get sent to Last.fm where the user's profile is updated. This helps build the Last.fm recommendation engine. My personal music collection weighs in at about 20GB. Very modest I know but it is mine, consisting of just about every CD I have purchased since I was maybe 12 years old. No pirating.

Connect your Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm with Rdio.

During the time of free streaming from Last.fm for players such as Banshee, Rhythmbox, one could also scrobble music from Rdio.com. For the streaming radio listener, this was great because it added an additional music engine to diversify your Last.fm profile. Also, when Rdio first started, it was free to stream from the browser for a few days a month. However, like all good things, Rdio ended the free service. Rdio now charges $9.99 for mobile and desktop streaming, $4.99 for desktop browser streaming. This is hard for me to justify since we still have Pandora.com, which is a freemium service (with ads). Also, for mobile, not only does one pay for Rdio streaming, but for their data plans as well.

Pithos desktop Pandora client, ad-free.

Luckily for the listeners, Pithos, a native Pandora Radio client for the GNOME Desktop is still able to stream music from Pandora.com, ad-free. Like the good old days when we streamed our Last.fm accounts through our desktop clients. However, Pandora does not support scrobbling so the recommendation engine is just not as good.

Today, I checked my email and there was a note from Rdio telling me: Stations, now free on mobile. Tune in.

Rdio knows me. They beckon to come back and listen-without paying a thing. In fact, Rdio has been offering this service to former subscribers since October 3rd, 2013. Some speculate that since partnering with Cumulus Media, an owner of 525 radio stations, that Rdio would be switching to ad-supported freemium model. Well that sounds great, I can add Rdio to my iHeartRadio app on my Nexus 4 phone. However it would still be nice to get the same free listening on my desktop again  but those days are pretty much gone.