Apple buys Beats and now Google has brought the music streaming service, Songza. There are some very difference here. Apple brought Beats for $3 Billion for the people not the products or service. Google purchased Songza for the same reason it brought Waze. These services are well loved and complement what Google is already doing with their own services. Songza currently has around 5.5 million active users. Beats streaming music service does not even have a 3rd of that.
Songza has built a great service which uses contextual expert-curated playlists to give you the right music at the right time. We aren’t planning any immediate changes to Songza, so it will continue to work like usual for existing users. Over the coming months, we’ll explore ways to bring what you love about Songza to Google Play Music. We’ll also look for opportunities to bring their great work to the music experience on YouTube and other Google products. In the meantime, check out their service to find a playlist for any mood you’re in — whether you’re feeling a little mellow or a lot funky. ~Google
The Songza team will now be integrated into the Google. Songza has said that nothing in the immediate future with the app. Songza will stay in its office in Long Island City for now and move into Google’s NYC HQ later. The Wall Street Journal however has reports Google plans on incorporating the application/service into its own Google Play All Music service. Songza like Beats Music service uses humans to enhance the music experience and create playlist. Services like Pandora and Spotify use algorithms to come up with playlist. Another bonus data point that Songza has and no one else does is that they know what people like to listen to based on the time of day, the weather, location, and activity. That is just the kind of data points that a company like Google loves to get a hold of.
We can’t think of a more inspiring company to join in our quest to provide the perfect soundtrack for everything you do. No immediate changes to Songza are planned, other than making it faster, smarter, and even more fun to use. In the meantime, we’ll be walking on sunshine. ~Songza
Why did Google had to act now and not because of the reason you might think. It was not to compete with Apple after the Beats acquisition. Songza was being approached by other companies so Google had to act fast before a bidding war got out of control. Like the bidding war for WhatsApp.