Rdio, the ad-free music subscription service, announced the reinvention of their app.  Rdio took everything that’s good and redesigned it to be simpler, faster and be more social.

What’s new?

The new and improved Rdio features a new look and feel that puts music and people front and center.  Navigation has also been simplified,  as everything is available in just one place.  The best thing about the new Rdio is the ability to add entire albums to playlists, which was one of their most-requested features.

“It was too easy for people to get lost in the vast information architecture of a service with 15 million songs, millions of artists, and a lot of people who they follow,” Malthe Sigurdsson, vice president of Rdio product design, said in a recent interview. “So we needed to make the overall navigation hierarchy and architecture better.”

The new Rdio is also more social, as it lets you see and listen to what your network is listening to in real-time from the People Sidebar.  And for those of you curious about certain songs you can check who listened to what tracks, or how many people listened to it, so you’ll get an idea of whether or not a certain song is worth your time.  And since social is the in thing, creating playlists and sharing them with your network is as easy as dragging and dropping songs to your playlist or collection.

Here are some of their other new features:

• Browse even faster — Find music at lightning speed because pages remember your place. Browse a continuous stream of albums, explore one and easily return to the place you left off.
• Create private playlists – In addition to public and collaborative playlists, now private playlists can be created and shared with just a select few.
• Easily discover people to follow — Check out Rdio’s latest music influencers in the People Sidebar and find others to follow such as artists, critics, record labels and brands.

Still, there’s still one feature that seems to be lacking in the new Rdio: personal ratings.  People are often baffled as to how a certain song got into “Heavy Rotation” or the list of songs most listened to so people are looking for a thumbs up or down option, so they can vote thumbs down for songs they hate and thumbs up for songs they really like.

Growing competition in the music cloud

While Rdio is hoping a rebranding will help them compete in a crowded music cloud space, Spotify recently released their iPad app and launched two other apps.  Fellody and Tastebuds allow Spotify users to connect based on their choice of music.  Fellody allows users to  flirt, date, chat, go to gigs, inside Spotify for free.  All you need to do is drag a song of your choice into Fellody and it will provide you with a list of people that match your song choice, age and location.

As for Tastebuds, the app scans your recently played songs and instantly shows a list of people near you who have the same taste in music.  The app is free on Spotify and it allows you to listen to your friend’s music and send them a message.

Pandora is also set to have their first quarter earnings report on May 23 after the market closes.  The music service is currently trading around $9.34 with a 52 week range of $7.83 to $26.00.  They recently announced that they have more than 150 million registered users, making their service the most widely used online music service in the US.