Skip to footer

Google buys Songza: How many music services does one company need?

Google announced Tuesday that it was buying the music streaming start-up Songza. The acquisition marks another example of the increasing dominance of streaming services in the world of digital music. 

|
Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP/File
A man walks past a Google sign at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

In another sign of the music industry's steady transition to streaming services, Google announced Tuesday it had purchased the free streaming service Songza. 

Google reportedly paid more than $39 million for the start-up, although neither Google nor Songza has commented on the price. 

Based in Long Island City, N.Y., the three-year old app Songza provides tailor-made playlists for different occasions, as opposed to the algorithmically generated playlists of services such as Pandora.

As of now, Songza users can rest assured that their experience with the service will stay the same for the time being. In a blog post, Google says, "We aren't planning any immediate changes to Songza, so it will continue to work like usual for existing users."

In a separate blog post, Songza echoed that user experience will not change, adding that "we can’t think of a better company to join in our quest to provide the perfect soundtrack for everything you do."

This acquisition comes shortly after tech giants such as Apple and Amazon have also gotten into the streaming business. In May, Apple bought Beats for $3 billion along with the company's trademark headphones and its curated streaming service. That's in addition to Apple's own iTunes Radio. More recently, Amazon released Prime Music, a free streaming service offering more than a million songs. 

The music-streaming business has accelerated at a rapid pace in recent years. In one example of streaming's dominance, Spotify announced in December that its users had streamed more than 4.5 billion hours of music in 2013, translating to roughly 38 minutes of music for each person on the planet. 

Recent months have seen a dip in sales for digital music downloads, while services such as Pandora and Spotify have only solidified their role as the go-to sources for online music, Reuters reports. 

Last year, Google launched its All Access music subscription service for $9.99 a month, available in the Google Play store and offering "unlimited listening to millions of songs." Google-owned YouTube is also in the process of developing subscription service. And Google will be looking for ways to incorporate Songza into its Google Play and YouTube music services, according to the company blog post. 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Google buys Songza: How many music services does one company need?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Horizons/2014/0702/Google-buys-Songza-How-many-music-services-does-one-company-need
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe