Rdio and Shazam Integration Goes International, Leaves Spotify In The Dust

By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.

Rdio and Shazam extended on Tuesday a joint feature in Shazam’s app that lets music fans preview and collect songs they’ve tagged from speakers into 29 new territories.

This is not a trivial integration.

Shazam believably claims to generate 10 percent of all digital music sales in the world, indicating that successful integration between music identification and collecting mechanisms might have a positive effect for on-demand subscriptions, which are slowly replacing downloads as the collection method of choice.

The key issue at play here is that music is harder to collect than ever in these fragmented times. We need all the help we can get to keep track of the stuff we like. Where is our music, anyway? It’s on multiple hard drives and flash memory modules, and, even worse, who knows how many profiles, likes, and follows across all of the web and all of the apps.

If people in all of these countries, now including France, Germany, and Spain, subscribe to Rdio, they can now add the music playing on speakers around them to their own permanent, pervasive music collections, which available just about anywhere, with a minimum of taps and fuss. (Non-subscribers get something too — an easier way to hear previews of songs they’ve tagged in Shazam.)

You can listen to the music you’ve collected from speakers in two ways: in the Shazam app, or by simply playing an automatically-generated playlist of all your self-curated tracks on Rd.io or any of Rdio’s apps.

Again: You’re holding up a telephone in a room where speakers are playing music to add music to your invisible music collection, which follows you everywhere without you having to remember it, with the single tap of an app, and without paying an additional cent. What year is this?

“By connecting Shazam to Rdio in a few simple steps, listeners around the world can also create a playlist on Rdio called ‘My Shazam Tracks,’” reads part of the announcement. “This playlist automatically updates with every new song tagged in Shazam, making it easy to relive an amazing night out, track for track, through the Rdio app.”

Just below the button for Rdio in the Shazam app is another button for Spotify. A few months after we reported that Spotify was mysteriously absent from Shazam, Spotify has made good on its promise to re-integrate with Shazam. However, tapping Spotify for a song in Shazam brings up a list of search results (for that song title by that artist name). You then have to scroll through the list and find the right track, and then collect it manually by adding it to a playlist yourself.

Meanwhile, tagging a song in Shazam collects it automatically in Rdio. You literally just tag the song as it plays in the air around you, and it goes into a playlist you can access from just about anywhere on the planet, even places without the internet or a cell tower. We could use more of this sort of thing.