Songza is Joining Google

[untog]

I think the reality here is that you can't be a tiny startup in areas like music. Licensing costs can kill you. Much better to be backed by a bigger organisation.

[hahainternet]

> I think the reality here is that you can't be a tiny startup in areas like music. Licensing costs can kill you.

We're a tiny startup trying to take advantage of this, I'm just a contract programmer though and it's more exploiting licensing costs than anything. I don't really disagree with you.

[yvsong]

I learned a similar lesson in another domain.

Songza's headphone-specific equalizer made my Sennheiser HD 558 on iPhone much more enjoyable with the profile for HD 580. Hope they provide a profile for HD 558. Hardware headphone amplifiers are obsolete. Software equalizers are the solution.

[giancarlostoro]

What I get from all of this: Make something Google or somebody else will buy you out for. Then play the waiting game.

[spankalee]

I just discovered Songaza because of this, and... awesome!

I work for Google, so I know I'm totally biased here, but Play Music is pretty great, and it does recommend good new music to me, but the playlists by activity, mood, setting, genre of Songaza already look much better.

I can't wait till there's some integration and I can save Songaza playlists to my library and pin them to my phone.

[Donzo]

I'm really satisfied with Google Play All Access. You can integrate your own library and add songs that you like while streaming. Since adding the songs to my library is pretty much indistinguishable from ownership, I basically never need to purchase another song again.

Also, since Google Now began stalking my search habits, I get all kinds of useful recommendations about when artists I like release new material.

The acquisition of Songza will likely make a great product even better.

[Navarr]

I feel like it's more likely they'll be completely separate until Play Music has absorbed all of Songza's features.

[jcromartie]

Songaza will shut down, even if they say they won't.

[viraptor]

If there was some split of recommendation by activity / mood, I'd be very happy. I did use the recommendations for quite a while when listening to mostly similar tracks. Then made a mistake of giving thumbs up to one electro track. Apparently it meant "ignore all my library, thumbs up etc. in the general blues / rock category; I want half of my recommendations to be for electro / dance music". Sigh...

[isaacwaller]

Please ask them not to shut down the Windows 8 app :(

[giancarlostoro]

I'm just going to assume Songza will become integral to Google Play All Music Access in the future. It wouldn't surprise me at all.

[contextual]

Google is uncool and can't even comprehend cool. They will ruin Songza or shut it down.

[tomkarlo]

Play Music sorely needed this - lots of great curated lists in addition to albums and playlists. Can't wait for the integration - I really like Songza for those times I'm working or driving and don't feel like playing close attention to building a playlist.

[fatbat]

Congrats to Songza! I really like Songza and discovered many great music I otherwise would not have found with the service. It has become my go to for music discovery.

I hope Songza continues and become even better. :)

[gtirloni]

We can’t think of a better company to join in our quest to provide the perfect soundtrack for everything you do.

Erm.. you got it backwards, folks.

No immediate changes to Songza are planned, other than making it faster, smarter, and even more fun to use.

If Songza was Youtube-like size, then yes. They are tiny so, yeah, unlikely.

[schnevets]

Oh wow! After Spotify started offering curated playlists, I thought Songza was dead in the water. This is probably the best result the team could have asked for.

[mirkules]

This made me sad. i used Songza for a while and actually preferred it over Pandora. Glad for the people that cashed out, but that means that the service will either die soon or it will be Google-plusified: something I clearly don't agree with.

So for anyone looking to cancel their account as I did, it's not really advertised anywhere. Go to legacy.songza.com, log in, click on your profile->settings then you will find a big red delete button.

I only discovered this after I tried to submit feedback asking how to cancel and got an automated suggestion with the above steps.

It's interesting you have to go to a legacy site to do this.

[toki5]

Just food for thought, not looking to spark an argument or anything -- doesn't it seem like canceling your account now is a little premature? Why not wait and see what changes actually happen, and cancel in protest to those?

[jmspring]

It's curious reading most of the comments...seems like most of those commenting hadn't actually used Songza.

Hand's down it was the best selection of curated playlists that were easy to discover. Spotify had something roughly similar, but you had to search specifically for it, where Songza was more categorized. I kinda like thinking of it as the very early days of the Web -- Songza was the early audio Yahoo ... that was cross platform.

I've seen some great lists from Nokia Music on Windows Phone and some decent lists from iTunes Radio, but Songza was generally better overall.

I'll keep using it, so long as it is a stand alone app. Once that ceases, I may move elsewhere.

[MrBuddyCasino]

My impression too. Tried 8rtacks, but the limited skipping and the terrible ui put me off.

It seems they are now redirecting all playlist URLs to daily.songza.com though - can I still access them in some other way? Being able to import them to Spotify would be killer.

[radiorental]

I remember when Aza first announced this on a list way back in the day. I had no idea they were still ploughing away, glad to hear it evolved. If I recall correctly they were originally just scraping audio soundtracks from youtube music videos.

I'm curious, generally speaking does a founder still have skin in the game at this stage or do people generally get bought out?

I know it's a naive question for most of you, just curious how things generally play.

http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/songza

[kin]

Apps that curate music seem to be pretty viral in usage. I feel like you can't say the current growth rate of users will really pay off.

Apple tried iTunes Radio and that failed so they snatched Beats. Google Play is not gaining enough traction so they've now snatched Songza.

Is Amazon going to join the gang? Or perhaps Facebook acquire Spotify to up the ante?

[ZanderEarth32]

Hadn't heard of Songza but just gave it a download.

I like the "Decade" breakdown and various genres you can filter by. The lack of genres or granular filters in Rdio is my biggest gripe with them (apart from my few issues with Rdio, it's still my favorite music streaming service).

[glennericksen]

Congrats to the Songza team. One of my favorite ways to listen to music by far.

[evertonfuller]

I wonder how much cash they were sinking. They didn't earn any money at all, they were the literal definition of waiting for a buyout.

[nichochar]

Songza is an 8tracks clone made by connected people in the valley, funded by connected people in the valley, and bought by rich people in the valley. Their product is not as good as the competition (8tracks, spotify, soundcloud cover everything, maybe rdio has some pretty slick features too), but still they did incredibly well... It's weird. Most of their playlists are made by the songza team, I would love to see their numbers.

Anyway, if you're looking for crowdsourced playlists, I would just use 8tracks

[timboslice]

Awesome news for Songza. It's my goto app for curated playlists. I'm excited to see what the future will bring!

[qmaxquique]

There are other products doing exactly the same and also covering other pain-points like data encryption and the possibility to host your own "personal-dropbox". You may want to test Owncloud 7. Check this terminal.com snapshot that I just created as a demo: https://terminal.com/tiny/fwv5ra8X8I

[largote]

Good for them, I love play music all access radio, but manually curated playlists are something else.

[Raphmedia]

Also, the old Songza interface was way better. Look there if you miss it. legacy.songza.com

[tindrlabs]

Very happy for Songza, use it everyday. As always, I hope they keep the service open.

[BrainInAJar]

Anyone know of another equivalent music service, I refuse to touch Google products

[tom3k]

The service I'm working on is still in its infancy, but I'd love to hear what people think of the concept; it basically helps musicians and photographers expose their content to a wider audience, and on the flip side, allows you to sit back and listen to a playlist of music whilst enjoying a beautiful photo slide show. The playlists are tailored to a user's mood, and you're able to filter the music based on genre. The website's voliyo.com, and if anyone's interested in signing up to the beta as a photographer or musician, feel free to message me for an invite code!

[jmspring]

My exact concern w/ how Google is treating Waze. Songza was great for curated playlists. I might find a round about way to leveraging Nokia Music on my iPhone (I've got it on a WP8 lumia that I use for dev) ... it's not bad. Not the same, but better than other options.