kartooner

Music gives a soul to the uni­verse, wings to the mind, flight to the imag­i­na­tion, and life to everything.

—Plato

Music has played a part in how I per­ceive the world around me, whether that be when I’m work­ing, spend­ing time with my kids, dri­ving my car, there’s never a moment where I’m not lis­ten­ing to the likes of Jimmy Eat World, Cold­play, Michael Jack­son (a favorite of mine for sev­eral years) and other groups that have con­tributed to my per­sonal soundtrack.

Years ago when I used Nap­ster for the first time I was in awe that I could type in the name of any song, for the most part and just down­load it. This seemed mag­i­cal to me, the notion that I could instantly lis­ten to any track I was think­ing of, in that moment, made me real­ize how use­ful the Inter­net had become.

After Nap­ster, I tried and still use a vari­ety of music dis­tri­b­u­tion ser­vices like iTunes, Groove­shark and Pan­dora, the lat­ter of the three is a music rec­om­men­da­tion ser­vice that plays sim­i­lar music based on your inter­ests, be that a band, genre or spe­cific artist.

Over the years I’ve real­ized that music is not a solo expe­ri­ence, rather it’s some­thing that you can share with others.

Rdio, a new music/social ser­vice, allows me to lis­ten to what­ever I feel like and add tracks and albums to my own per­sonal col­lec­tion but more impor­tantly it gives me the oppor­tu­nity to share my tastes and pref­er­ences with friends.

The design of the online appli­ca­tion is stun­ning with an inter­face that show­cases the music and com­mu­nity fea­tures. You just search for a song, artist or album (much like Nap­ster and other P2P ser­vices, except this is legal) and queue it up and if you want, add it to your collection.

Those who you fol­low can see what you’re lis­ten­ing to, what you’ve added and can sub­scribe to playlists you can cre­ate. It’s all very sim­ple and intu­itive to use.

It’s changed the way I lis­ten to and con­sume music and as a result I’ve found that I’m buy­ing less music from iTunes or Amazon.

For $4.99 you can listen/stream your col­lec­tion online and for a few bucks more ($9.99) you can stream music online and to hand­held devices.

It’s closed beta right now, but you can still sent them your email address for an invite to the service.

I really heart Rdio. You can find me here.