The official blog of Rdio, the music streaming service, covering product launches, outages, and its shutdown.
HN links it for Rdio's announcements, including Vdio and the 2015 shutdown, and for product details compared with Spotify.
Rdio offers a 30 second clip before asking you to sign up for sign in.
http://blog.rdio.com/us/2010/10/now-live-embedding-rdio.html
This isn't a totally open, perfect tool, but Spotify is constrained by the major labels it works with, and I think its good to see them pushing out beyond Facebook.
I'm not sure if it was a direct inspiration, but the UI reminds me of Vdio (http://blog.rdio.com/us/2013/04/introducing-vdio.html). I can't link to the actual site as it has since shut down.
Rdio offers "Protected Accounts"
http://blog.rdio.com/us/2012/09/now-available-on-rdio-protected-accounts.html
Here is Rdio's announcement of the shutdown:
http://blog.rdio.com/us/2015/11/important-news-from-rdio.html
link to actual rdio blog post because I hate gizmodo
http://blog.rdio.com/us/2013/04/introducing-vdio.html