[written August 12, 2015 – Rdio has since folded and was acquired by Pandora]]
This apparently has been in the works for a while. Rdio is a global streaming service created by the guys who invented Skype. It competes with services like Pandora and hopes to break into the “streaming to your connected car” market.
Regular visitors here probably know that Cumulus put all their stations into iHeartRadio which seemed odd – the first thing a visitor to iHeartradio sees is a list of (former) Clear Channel stations trying to lure visitors away from Cumulus, along with custom genre based streams not playing on an over the air station.
The stated purpose of the iheart deal was that Clear Channel would promote Sweet Jack – the Groupon like deal of the day. [Sweet Jack has since morphed into Sweet Deals] I never saw or heard any such. promotion. According to Tom Taylor, today was the cutover day for 450 Cumulus stations to be added to Rdio. Rdio is hoping you will pay for a subscription to listen to music.
Cumulus has been rolling out new web sites that pretty much suck, at least for the news/talk stations. There is no program schedule, only an incomplete list of shows
The good news is the web sites have lots more room for ads!
At least as of this morning, the stations are still in the iHeartRadio app, but no longer on the web sites