The guys who turned the music world upside down with KaZaA are at it again, this time they are set to launch a new music subscription service called Rdio.
Serial entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom of Sweden and Janus Friis of Denmark are moving on from revolutionising voice communication which they did with Skype, to now try their hand at music distribution up against Apple’s iTunes store.
According to the New York Times the guys have set up offices in LA and San Francisco and are ” hoping to introduce a music subscription service by early next year that offers seamless access to music from both PCs and mobile phones”.
Rdio is seeking label deals and even has a CEO, Drew Larner, who notes the disdain with which the labels regarded the once-renegade P2P app KaZaA in yesteryear: “The ironies are very interesting.”
No word on whether Rdio will redeploy the same kind of P2P network that has made Zennstrom and Friis famous. The pair first developed the Global Index distribution system for KaZaA, then used a variant to underpin Skype’s communication backbone. Then they thought they could make online video delivery more efficient using Global Index, so started Joost under the codename The Venice Project.
