Rdio CEO Anthony Bay and Cumulus Media Inc CMLS CEO and chairman Lew Dickey recently covered Rdio's place in the saturated world of free music streaming.
Founded four years ago and live in 60 countries, Rdio is established as a subscription music service. Now it's shifting and making its service free based on ad revenue generated from the Internet radio model. Searchable music streaming is only available through subscription, putting it a step behind competitor Spotify.
"There's certain audiences that are quite happy to listen to music for free. There's a lot of free options out there. In order to make that work economically, you need to have ads," said Bay.
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He described Rdio's partnership with Cumulus as "key" for selling ads and programming. Cumulus is investing $75 million into Rdio over a five-year period.
"We think the audio space is widening," said Dickey, "and so this an opportunity for us to take content and compliment our broadcast platform, and content between what we have in our 460 stations plus all of the exclusive content we have with Westwood One, to know distribute that on this digital app as well, not only in this country, but globally."
Jason Cunningham had no position with the mentioned entities while writing this article. Visit Jason on Twitter at @JasonCunningham and @Benzinga.
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