Songza is Joining Google(daily.songza.com)

157 pointsby jervisfm12 tahun yang lalu88 comments

daily.songza.com

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

89 comments

untog12 tahun yang lalu

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.

hahainternet12 tahun yang lalu

> 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.

yvsong12 tahun yang lalu

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.

mbell12 tahun yang lalu

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

Huh? Equalization and amplification are rather orthogonal concerns.

yvsong12 tahun yang lalu

I should have limited my comments to mobile listeners with mid to low impedance headphones (which are the vast majority). I used to listen to iPhone with HD 580 (300 ohm) directly, with full volume and no amplifier/equalizer. It's loud enough for sensitive ears, and very enjoyable, better than HD 558. With amplifiers the sound is a little better, but not worth the inconvenience. For mid to low impedance headphones, amplifiers are often used to improve sound quality, not volume. Software equalizers (like those in Songza) would work well, and further shrink the market of amplifiers. Remember that in this mobile internet age, the American consumers have voted for Beats, I'm not sure what for, perhaps the overall user experience.

monsieur_krabs12 tahun yang lalu

> 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.

jmspring12 tahun yang lalu

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

rdl12 tahun yang lalu

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.

pmh12 tahun yang lalu

EQ won't help if you can't actually power the cans and in nearly all cases, won't help with noise or distortion due to the source.

For many mobile sources, you'll really want one for 250 Ohms. The HD558s by comparison are really low impedance.

An EQ can certainly help make your headphones sound more "interesting" or "better" though.

jdong12 tahun yang lalu

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.

giancarlostoro12 tahun yang lalu

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

viraptor12 tahun yang lalu

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.

spyder12 tahun yang lalu

Creating some cool product is easier than something cool AND profitable. And probably these people like to work on making the product better and not on making it profitable. Also isn't the big companies buying you is a profit for you?

spankalee12 tahun yang lalu

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.

Donzo12 tahun yang lalu

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.

rtpg12 tahun yang lalu

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

The recommendations are really great, though.

Navarr12 tahun yang lalu

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

fidlefodl12 tahun yang lalu

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

jcromartie12 tahun yang lalu

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

alttab12 tahun yang lalu

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

tyrelb12 tahun yang lalu

Most acquisitions that google goes through they shut-down, unless it's really core (like Docs). Songza will be shut down, but the team will join Play or whatever...

eru12 tahun yang lalu

Like Docs, Maps, blogger and youtube?

lmm12 tahun yang lalu

Docs was google's only docs service, and subsequent acquisitions have been squashed into it (e.g. etherpad). Maps is google's only maps service. Blogger was more-or-less google's only blog service until recently, and I wouldn't count on it surviving much longer in the age of google+. Youtube happened the other way around, in that google killed google video and merged it into youtube.

Is play music more established than songza? I think yes, and google is unlikely to maintain both of them in parallel.

giarc12 tahun yang lalu

I see this as similar to Waze acquisition. Waze continues to operate to this day.

jcromartie12 tahun yang lalu

Waze is an important data source for traffic in Google Maps. They didn't want to lose that data by killing the Waze app.

b2themax12 tahun yang lalu

Seems like an aqui-hire.

viraptor12 tahun yang lalu

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...

isaacwaller12 tahun yang lalu

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

giancarlostoro12 tahun yang lalu

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.

contextual12 tahun yang lalu

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

tomkarlo12 tahun yang lalu

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.

fatbat12 tahun yang lalu

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. :)

gtirloni12 tahun yang lalu

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.

schnevets12 tahun yang lalu

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.

mirkules12 tahun yang lalu

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.

toki512 tahun yang lalu

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?

mirkules12 tahun yang lalu

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.

jmspring12 tahun yang lalu

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.

MrBuddyCasino12 tahun yang lalu

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.

radiorental12 tahun yang lalu

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

kin12 tahun yang lalu

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?

ZanderEarth3212 tahun yang lalu

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).

glennericksen12 tahun yang lalu

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

evertonfuller12 tahun yang lalu

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.

nichochar12 tahun yang lalu

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

timboslice12 tahun yang lalu

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

qmaxquique12 tahun yang lalu

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

largote12 tahun yang lalu

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

Raphmedia12 tahun yang lalu

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

tindrlabs12 tahun yang lalu

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

BrainInAJar12 tahun yang lalu

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

tom3k12 tahun yang lalu

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!

BrainInAJar12 tahun yang lalu

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.

tom3k12 tahun yang lalu

Thanks for the feedback! You're not alone in sharing this view, so I'd definitely like to try and find a conceptual workaround for those who like to keep their music open in a background tab.

jmspring12 tahun yang lalu

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.

Kiro12 tahun yang lalu

So Songza is basically a blog?

akx12 tahun yang lalu

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

ashman512 tahun yang lalu

Because Skynet isn't Skynet without Songza!

gress12 tahun yang lalu

A response to Apple buying Beats?

morenoh14912 tahun yang lalu

no where near the same magnitude

gress12 tahun yang lalu

Similar magnitude to the beats streaming service.

jpeg_hero12 tahun yang lalu

Our incredible journey!

aaronchriscohen12 tahun yang lalu

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

breadbox12 tahun yang lalu

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.

alphakappa12 tahun yang lalu

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.

notatoad12 tahun yang lalu

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

aarohmankad12 tahun yang lalu

There's Saavn, but it does a mediocre job IMO.

http://www.saavn.com/

donniezazen12 tahun yang lalu

I wonder if they are even legal.

balladeer12 tahun yang lalu

And why would you wonder so? Some insight please.

donniezazen12 tahun yang lalu

Creative industry in Asian country are highly disorganized. For India, one of the best possible way to watch any new content if either in movie theaters or live on television. Internet sucks and cable companies suck too that makes it pretty hard for folks to get content they actually want to watch. Tech savvy folks go for torrents and less techy folks buy pirated content from street vendors.

Insight is they are based off NY which makes they impervious to Indian laws. And personally, I haven't come across any good Indian website that gives you impression that you are buying legal content.

mjklin12 tahun yang lalu

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

"You got to let that raga drop"

donniezazen12 tahun yang lalu

Half of the time it doesn't even work.

pbreit12 tahun yang lalu

Ever considered that it might be listener-driven?

breadbox12 tahun yang lalu

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

[deleted]12 tahun yang lalu

tomkarlo12 tahun yang lalu

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.

maxerickson12 tahun yang lalu

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.

baddox12 tahun yang lalu

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

rahilsondhi12 tahun yang lalu

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

baddox12 tahun yang lalu

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.

cdcarter12 tahun yang lalu

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

pluggerguy12 tahun yang lalu

What are you suggesting as an alternative classification system?

nostrademons12 tahun yang lalu

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.

haberman12 tahun yang lalu

> Even this is biased toward recency, and reflects my own lack of knowledge of pre-baroque music.

This is random, but one of the things I love about Civilization IV is that when you enter a new era, it plays music from that era, to really give you the sense of moving through time.

Except that when you enter the "Medieval" era, it plays this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g7jOKLUus8

A brilliant piece of music, and a great credit to them that they would have chosen this piece and this recording of it. An absolute masterpiece. Of the High Renaissance, that is. Sheppard was born c. 1515, and the Renaissance in music is usually dated to begin somewhere around 1400.

I guess I'm saying you're not the only one. :)

bsdetector12 tahun yang lalu

> Well, to a classical music afficionado, you might have "Gregorian, Rennaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Avant Garde, Contemporary, New Age, Popular".

You're just complaining then about what the top-level nodes are on the classification tree of music genres. If you have Classical with Gregorian as a sub-genre that's the same thing as having Gregorian as a top-level genre. Same with OP's problem with "World Music" genre (except for the culturally insulting aspect of it).

The only time it could possibly matter is if the system doesn't have sub-genres... but that would be a pretty ridiculous system.

Really genres suck for a different reason, because they are vague and overlapping and subjective. What I want is a composable classification system with actual objective traits about the music... so I can say "female lead singer, german language, trumpets, beats-per-minute 80-120" and so forth. I don't know if such music exists, but I would listen to it if I could find it.

edit: didn't realize the Songza doesn't have any sub-genres of Classical, so include it as a "pretty ridiculous system".

nostrademons12 tahun yang lalu

Pandora has that on the backend - they will tell you why they recommended a song, and it's often things like "female lead singer, heavy metal beat, fast tempo". I don't think they manually let you enter in values for the different dimensions in their database to search, though.

baddox12 tahun yang lalu

I don't think there's anything wrong with that sort of detailed classification, but I think it's simply out of scope for a consumer-facing music product.

abuddy12 tahun yang lalu

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

michaelmior12 tahun yang lalu

I see over a dozen channels dedicated to classical music.