Rdio
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Rdio was an on-demand music streaming subscription service launched in August 2010. It offered paid subscriptions for ad-free, on-demand listening with social features — playlists, recommendations and music sharing — and expanded to 85 markets, acquiring India's Dhingana in 2014 to enter the Indian market.
02 / Rdio FAILURE REASONS
Why it failed
Rdio lost a scale war it could not win. It never disclosed user numbers, but estimates put it far behind Spotify (75 million active users in June 2015) and Pandora (79.4 million), both of which had years-long head starts — and in 2015 Apple, Google and Microsoft all pushed seriously into streaming, crowding the field further. Rdio spent five years matching Spotify's moves instead of outgrowing it, accumulated mounting debt, and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 2015.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Bankruptcy
The company entered bankruptcy proceedings.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Rdio filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 2015 to shed accumulated debt.
- 02
Pandora agreed to buy its key assets — technology and intellectual property — for $75 million in cash, hiring many of its US product, engineering and content-licensing staff; CEO Anthony Bay and most international staff did not continue.
- 03
The Rdio brand was wound down in all 85 markets, with the asset sale expected to close in Q1 2016 and remaining assets auctioned by the bankruptcy court.