Google has followed Apple’s lead in buying Beats Electronics and Beats Music, by acquiring its own music streaming service, Songza.
First launched in 2007 and revamped in 2011, Songza is a curation-based music service much like Beats Music. Songza offers a multitude of customized playlists created by music experts, which revolve around different moods and activities. For example, in its iPhone app, Songza provides playlists for “Working Out,” “Waking Up Happy,” “Feeling Confident,” and more.
While Beats Music and Songza differ in some aspects, such as the way playlists are created, the two services are similar as to their emphasis on curation by humans, which is being seen more and more as a must-have feature for such services.
Google is also following Apple’s lead in keeping Songza as an independent app, although it reportedly has plans to integrate some of the Songza features into Google Play Music and other Google services in the future. Songza will remain available on multiple platforms.
Songza has relatively small user numbers, (5 million), when compared to competitors such as Pandora or Spotify, however it does boast more users than Beats Music, which had 250,000 subscribers in May. (It should be noted that Songza is a free ad-supported service, while Beats Music does charge a monthly subscription fee.)
The amount Google paid for Songza was not officially announced, however some reports have indicated that Google paid around $15 million for the service.
Songza is available free for the iPad and iPhone in the App Store. [DIRECT LINK]
