$17.5 Million of Funding for Social Music Start-Up

Rdio, a San Francisco, CA based social music start-up company, founded in 2008, announced that it has raised $17.5 million financing round from its old investor Janus Friis (Rdio co founder), Atomico and Skype, and also with the participation of a new investor, Mangrove Capital Partners. Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström funded the company through Atomico, their technology investment group. The company’s officials say that the new funding will be used to hire more staff, increase the marketing efforts and the product development, as well as to spread out to new platforms and regions.

The Chairman of Warner Bros. Records, Rob Cavallo, became one of Rdio new business partners, being appointed by the company’s officials as its new director. The board of directors already included co founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström (the original founders of Skype) Mark Dyne (Chief Executive Officer of Europlay Capital Advisers) and Chief Executive Officer Drew Larner. A successful Grammy nominee producer, Mr. Cavallo joined the company to help strengthen Rdio’s relationship with the music industry. The company has already developed relationships with EMI Music, Universal Music Group, Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group and it has agreements with many indie labels.

The company hopes to blend internet radio, social networking and music playback all together and if this is a success, then music streaming services could have a huge impact on the music business. Rdio offers a standard version and a premium version of a web music streaming service that adds mobile access. The idea is to enable its users to listen to music on a computer, pause it and then pick up where they left off on a phone or some other device. Users can exchange their play lists and see what their friends are listening to. The difference for Rdio is that users can listed to entire albums without interruption, while other radio type websites play different music genres that users enjoy buy they don’t let you choose some specific play order or songs to listen to. Even though the name suggests this, Rdio is not a radio service where you can’t choose what you want to hear. It uses a paid service subscription to gain complete access to its 100% library of licensed music, having more than 8 million songs available for its listeners. Also, because there are people who are not willing to pay for their music, Rdio offers a 7 day free trial and hopes that its users will like so much the quality of the music played that they will be convinced to subscribe for one of the packages. “We are changing the way we find and listen to music,” said Janus Friis, Rdio co-founder. “Anything and everything is instantly available from any computer and phone and easily shared with our friends. The days of expensive music downloads are coming to an end.”

Rdio has previously raised more than $6 million from its founders and Skype.