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Freemium key to Rdio’s growth, says new CEO

By | Published on Tuesday 11 February 2014

Rdio

New Rdio CEO Anthony Bay has conducted an interview with CNET, in which he drops a few interesting nuggets about the future of the company, and the streaming industry in general. “If you read the reviews and you talk to customers, people who use Rdio love Rdio”, he said. However, he admits: “The biggest problem is, not enough people use Rdio”.

Although he wouldn’t say how many people actually currently use Rdio, he said that the company has “done a very good job at attracting lots of people”, but has been hindered by the lack of a freemium version. Rdio originally launched without a Spotify-style freemium version, though slowly began to add it in various territories, before bringing it to the US last month.

Given that Beats Music has just launched in the US with no free option, what he has to say about the role of freemium in upselling premium is interesting. He admits: “The problem is we didn’t have a free version that could keep people around and offer one audience, one very large audience, a way to have a relationship with us every day. They had to decide to spend ten bucks or leave. As a result of that, our numbers aren’t as big as we’d like them to be”.

Read the interview in full here.



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