Like many of you reading this, I used not-quite-legal ways to obtain my music fix. For the same effort, I could either pay ten bucks to buy a single album or download every song by an artist for free. The choice was an easy one for me to make. I rationalized it by saying musicians living in multi-million dollar houses won’t miss my few dollars. But that really only covers the small minority, most need every dime they get to buy such luxury items as food and rent.

About a year ago I decided to stop being such a cheap person and start paying for my music. While I made the first small steps for supporting artists there was still no way I would pay $10 an album. Listening to roughly five new albums a month if I went legitimate I would be broke faster than the indie artist I was stealing from. But then I saw the shining beacon at the end of the cheapskate’s tunnel, Rdio.

Rdio is basically an all you can eat buffet for music lovers. You pay a flat fee of $9.99 and get all the music your ears could ever desire. By becoming a member you get access to their entire song library (roughly ten million songs) on any Internet connected device. After signing in you simply click on a song and it streams from Rdio’s servers directly to yours with great quality and virtually no buffering. If you have a smart phone (Android, Blackberry, any IOS device, and Windows Phone 7) it also allows you to sync songs onto its app, for offline listening so you never have to be without your precious tunes.

Music discovery is another key feature that Rdio brings to the table. It gives you auto-recommendations whenever you log in, and allows you to follow people of similar taste in a twitter-esque manner. When listening to a new band I don’t feel rushed into making up my mind on whether to purchase it or not. The album will always be there waiting for me to get around to it, and if I fall in love with it I have that entire band’s discography for me at the touch of a finger.

Rdio may not be a completely original idea. Services like Pandora, last.fm, Spotify, or Rhapsody have all been doing similar business, however Rdio blows them away. Pandora and last.fm don’t allow you to choose individual songs or artist, just a “radio” station. The experience is much smoother on Rdio than it is on Spotify and just feels more polished. Finally Rhapsody is just Rhapsody. After trying to cancel for three straight months after horrible service, Rhapsody has earned a special spot as my most hated thing on the Internet.

While all these features above are just icing upon the metaphorical cake in this situation. The true greatness of Rdio is the support you lend to your favorite musicians. Musicians work hard pouring their feeling into their songs, the least you can do is financially support them. By no means are record companies justified by suing the oblivion out of people caught pirating, but neither was I justified by pirating music in the first place. This buffet style of consummation is the happy medium where I get my unlimited music, and artists get their paycheck.