Last month, Rdio announced it would be shutting down as part of a $75 million deal that would see key parts of its business acquired by rival streaming service Pandora. While existing customers were moved to Rdio’s Free tier, all signs pointed to the site shutting down completely by the end of the year.
That has now been confirmed in an email sent to customers yesterday evening. “As we announced last month, Rdio is being acquired,” the email reads. “As part of the acquisition, the Rdio service will be shutting down worldwide on December 22, 2015, at approximately 5 p.m. PST.”
That gives customers less than a week to find a new musical home on the Web, but fortunately both Rdio and a certain competitor are making the process easy. The former recently added export options, allowing users to take their playlists, favorites, and comments with them, while yesterday Spotify announced an import tool to allow Rdio users to move their data to the service.
In addition to the email, Rdio’s farewell page has been updated with a note on the company’s final date of operation. The page gives users a chance to reflect on their history with the streaming service, showing them the songs and albums they listened to the most, as well as the first track they listened to upon signing up.
Both the email sent to customers and the farewell page read “Goodbye … for now,” indicating that the team members moving to Pandora hope to retain some of the company spirit. “We’re honored to have connected you with the music you love,” reads the emails final paragraph. “And we look forward to bringing great music experiences to even more listeners in the future as part of the Pandora team.”
With this acquisition, Pandora is hoping to bolster itself to better compete with Spotify as well as newer competition like Apple Music and Tidal. Whether or not this will work remains to be seen, but with Pandora’s different focus from its competitors — Internet radio instead of a virtual music collection — it should stand a better chance.
