Songza is Joining Google

http://daily.songza.com/google/

by jervisfm • 12 years ago

157 88 12 years ago

daily.songza.com

glennericksen• 12 years ago

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

largote• 12 years ago

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

untog• 12 years ago

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.

yvsong2• 12 years ago

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.

rdl• 12 years ago

Can you actually do this for high impedance headphones? I don't see how you can EQ a 250 Ohm headphone like the Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro off an iPhone and have it sound at all acceptable, but I'm not an audio engineer.

jdong• 12 years ago

Software equalizers can never replace hardware solutions. They might improve your experience (your mileage _will_ vary), but there's no way you'll get an iPhone to drive sennheisers HD800s while sounding even remotely acceptable.

mbell• 12 years ago

Hardware headphone amplifiers are obsolete. Software equalizers are the solution.

Huh? Equalization and amplification are rather orthogonal concerns.

jmspring3• 12 years ago

They never did get to adding in Westone. So I had to improvise.

monsieur_krabs• 12 years ago

Hardware headphone amplifiers are obsolete. Software equalizers are the solution.

What?

My headphones need a lot more power than is provided by a typical headphone jack. Not to mention the DAC built into most amps that gets rid of any line noise. Equalizers and amps are two completely different things, too.

hahainternet• 12 years ago

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.

giancarlostoro2• 12 years ago

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

viraptor2• 12 years ago

Are we really at the point where it's either a big corporation buying you or nothing? Why not: Make something Google or somebody else will buy you out for; then keep it profitable and successful; if some offer comes - consider it.

schnevets• 12 years ago

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.

gtirloni• 12 years ago

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.

tomkarlo2• 12 years ago

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.

tindrlabs• 12 years ago

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

spankalee• 12 years ago

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.

Navarr• 12 years ago

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

fidlefodl• 12 years ago

I'm quite happy to see this, from a Google Music user perspective.

I was getting quite antsy with the lack of music related features. Google Music was feeling so.. lacking. I was close to switching back to Spotify, or trying something new.

Glad to see something is still being worked on heh

jcromartie2• 12 years ago

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

alttab• 12 years ago

Ooooh a discordant view! How exciting. Can you elaborate?

isaacwaller• 12 years ago

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

contextual• 12 years ago

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

Donzo• 12 years ago

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.

rtpg• 12 years ago

one reason to purchase is if you want to download the MP3s (or support the artists directly).

The recommendations are really great, though.

giancarlostoro2• 12 years ago

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.

viraptor2• 12 years ago

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...

evertonfuller• 12 years ago

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.

jpeg_hero• 12 years ago

Our incredible journey!

fatbat• 12 years ago

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. :)

timboslice• 12 years ago

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

ZanderEarth32• 12 years ago

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).

breadbox2• 12 years ago

Oh look, yet another music classification system that lists twelve different genres of music invented after the CD player but has one genre labelled "Classical" to cover several centuries of wildly varying musical styles.

pluggerguy• 12 years ago

What are you suggesting as an alternative classification system?

abuddy• 12 years ago

I think he means that there should be a sublist for classical music. See the table to the right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_music#History

nostrademons2• 12 years ago

Well, to a classical music afficionado, you might have "Gregorian, Rennaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Avant Garde, Contemporary, New Age, Popular". Even this is biased toward recency, and reflects my own lack of knowledge of pre-baroque music.

Or you could slice it by form: "Hymns, Choirs, Quartets, Symphonies, Concertos, Sonatas, Operas, Ballets, Rondos, Minuets, Gavottes, Chaconnes, Themes & variations, Musicals, Film scores, Popular & rock music."

Or by instrument: "Harpsichord, Piano, harp, Violin, Viola, Cello, Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, French Horn, Bassoon, Trumpet, Trombone, Tuba, Guitar, Percussion, Electric Instruments".

I think the general point is that categories depend upon the listener. You can't impose a categorization on data without understanding who the audience is and what their mental model of the field is. And the more expertise you gain in a field, the deeper your categorization gets.

pbreit• 12 years ago

Ever considered that it might be listener-driven?

breadbox2• 12 years ago

It's self-fulfilling. I was a potential listener that was driven away.

tomkarlo2• 12 years ago

1. That doesn't seem to be actually true - I see three categories associated with Classical in the listing on Songza.com under Genres 2. Songza, in general, isn't so much about browsing narrowly-defined genre categories. You'd be more likely to find specific time periods or styles represented as Channels under Classical than as their own sub-categories.

alphakappa• 12 years ago

Imagine how international listeners feel about music classification systems (nearly every one out there) that clump all international music into 'World Music'. Just looking at Indian music, there's probably a few dozen high level categories you can create for completely different genres of music.

North Indian, South Indian, Hindustani, Carnatic, Film music from maybe a dozen different languages that are wildly different, qawwalis, ghazals, Rabindra Sangeet, music from different periods of Indian cinema... I could go on... sigh.

notatoad• 12 years ago

Are there no Indian music services that do a better job?

mjklin• 12 years ago

Didn't you hear what the king told the boogie men?

"You got to let that raga drop"

donniezazen3• 12 years ago

Half of the time it doesn't even work.

maxerickson• 12 years ago

Check out everynoise:

http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html

(look at the bottom of the cloud)

Some exposition here:

http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=log&id=392

and in other posts there.

baddox3• 12 years ago

That's an interesting visualization, but the concept isn't even remotely usable for a consumer-facing music product.

rahilsondhi• 12 years ago

Perhaps the market for Classical music isn't big? NBD to me...

baddox3• 12 years ago

Is that necessarily that bad? I bet there is a heck of a lot more published recorded music after the CD player than before. If you weight by listens per day, I suspect that would be even more so.

cdcarter• 12 years ago

That's why there are channels, that are just very broadly sorted into genres to start.

michaelmior• 12 years ago

I see over a dozen channels dedicated to classical music.

radiorental• 12 years ago

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

gress2• 12 years ago

A response to Apple buying Beats?

morenoh149• 12 years ago

no where near the same magnitude

gress2• 12 years ago

Similar magnitude to the beats streaming service.

qmaxquique• 12 years ago

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

BrainInAJar2• 12 years ago

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

tom3k2• 12 years ago

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!

BrainInAJar2• 12 years ago

So, here'd be my concern with that. I very rarely put on music and just "experience" it. Usually when I put on music it's in the background while I work on other things. I can't imagine myself ever wanting to look at a photo slideshow while listening to music.

jmspring3• 12 years ago

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.

mirkules2• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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?

mirkules2• 12 years ago

Not premature at all, I simply do not agree to using Google products (or rather I do not agree to their Terms of Service) and was providing a hard-to-find delete button should others need to use it (for whatever reason).

Indeed I'm not trying to start a "OMG everyone cancel your accounts!!" train, but I can understand why you (and whoever downvoted me) viewed it as a protest cancellation.

aaronchriscohen• 12 years ago

so happy for elias and his team. this is a huge win for the queens tech community!

ashman5• 12 years ago

Because Skynet isn't Skynet without Songza!

kin• 12 years ago

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?

Kiro• 12 years ago

So Songza is basically a blog?

akx• 12 years ago

No, but the main page redirects to daily.songza.com without any indication if you're outside the US, apparently...

jmspring3• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

nichochar• 12 years ago

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

Raphmedia• 12 years ago

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

Songza is Joining Google

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