buys Songza to beef up its music service

BY GreenBot Staff

Published 1 Jul 2014

In early ne, we wrote about a report in the New York st claiming that was about to buy Songza. Today that news is confirmed by a short simple post on the official Songza blog.

The move is a bid to make ay Music more appealing by adding in Songza’s top-notch playlist curation. Songza doesn’t have a huge number of listeners: less than 6 million, a fraction of the tens of millions claimed by Spotify ra. doesn’t need Songza for its licensed music catalog or streaming service (it already has a bigger catalog in ay Music). 

at Songza brings to the table is smart, contextual playlist curation. Currently, you can tell to “play some music” ay Music will spin up a radio station of streaming music based on your tastes. It’s not really very good at that, it’s not very smart or contextual. 

Songza lets you play “music for a Tuesday afternoon” or “music to play at work” or “music to play while working out.” It doesn’t take a big leap of imagination to see how that fits naturally into ‘s contextual search engine. ready you can ask questions on your phone it will provide an answer taking into account your location, time of day, weather, search history. th Songza, “OK …play some music” could automatically know you’re at the gym, or work, or that it’s a rainy Saturday afternoon.

According to the ay page on +, there are no immediate changes planned for the Songza service. So if you’re a fan, don’t worry, it’ll continue to work the way it does…for now. In addition, says, “‘ll also look for opportunities to bring their great work to the music experience on YouTube other products.” th Apple acquiring Beats, this is probably a smart acquisition for .