Rdio And Shazam Expand Full Music Track Streaming Partnership To UK, Canada, Australia, Brazil And Mexico

Shazam and Rdio have offered something wonderful for U.S. users as of fall 2012, providing full track streaming for tagged music via Rdio, thanks to a “Listen Free on Rdio” link within the Shazam app. That means that once you use either the free or paid version of Shazam to identify a song from your device, you can then listen to the entire track, so long as you’re either an Rdio subscriber or have signed up for a free 14-day trial. Now, the service is available to Rdio and Shazam users in Canada, Australia, Brazil, Mexico and the UK in addition to the U.S.

That means it’s now available to a potential combined audience of 120 million users of Shazam’s free app, which is great news for Rdio. Rdio has only around 1 million monthly active users according to AppData, which means it stands to gain a lot from the increased exposure afforded it by getting in front of Shazam users. And of course for Shazam, it offers another incentive for users to access its services.

Rdio is still getting the better end of the bargain, however, unless Shazam is also taking in referral fees for any subscriptions that come out of tags it sends Rdio’s way. That’s because this provides a big jump start to the customer acquisition and conversion funnel that Rdio has in place, which depends on convincing free trial users into subscribers at either $4.99 per month for the Rdio web plan, or $9.99 per month for the unlimited version which includes mobile apps access and offline storage.

Another recent win for Rdio is being selected as a streaming partner for Twitter #Music, the recently launched app from Twitter based on its acquisition of startup We Are Hunted. Both introduce it to new users, who might not have found the service through other means. Rdio still trails far behind rival Spotify in terms of user base, but its services compare favorably to that company’s in my opinion. Hopefully these new inbound customer streams start paying big dividends for Rdio.