Songza con

December 07, 2015/ Bil Kanawati by Bil KanawatiSongza, one of Canada’s most beloved streaming music services, is shutting down on January 31st, 2016. That’s the bad news. The good news is that its best aspects - namely, its curated playlists based on genre, mood, activity, and time of day - are available as part of Google Play Music, Google’s answer to streaming competitors Spotify and Apple Music. including the bulk of Songza’s features as part of a free, ad-supported tier of its service, which has been the case in the US since June but was made available for the first time in Canada as of December 2nd, eliminating the need for the standalone Songza app. Choosing a playlist in the standalone Songza app. Boasting three million monthly users, Songza was more popular in Canada than anywhere else in the world. To put that number in perspective, the US with nine times the population also had a user base of three million. The service was so successful in Canada that Songza opened a domestic office and hired Canadian radio icon Alan Cross as the Head of Curation for Songza Canada.Not long after Google purchased Songza in July of 2014, the Canadian office was shuttered, leaving the playlists like “Hockey Night with Mayor Rob Ford” and “A Road Trip Through Canada” (with selections taken straight from Burton Cummings’ iPod) to an uncertain fate. Now we know that these playlists will live on - in fact, thanks to the Google transition these themed playlists are now available in 13 countries.Canada’s importance to Songza and Google was underscored by Chris Welch, reporting in The Verge that "expanding Play Music's free experience to Canada was one crucial thing that needed to happen before Songza could go away."The highly competitive streaming music landscape is primed for consolidation. With Songza being folded into Google Play Music, Beats Music being wholly subsumed into Apple Music, and the bankruptcy of Rdio (which cited Canada as its second-biggest market), and YouTube Red (another ad-free subscription service) poised to enter Canada sometime in 2016, things are only going to get more interesting.

The once much-hyped-then-forgotten Songza service has re-emerged as a customizable Internet radio service. Linked Gallery > Featured Image --> The once much-hyped-then-forgotten Songza service has re-emerged as a customizable Internet radio service. Much like Pandora, Songza aims to let users create personalized radio stations by seeding a song and then voting up or down on the playlist that results. It uses a team of “music curators” to help determine these playlists and is very vocal about not using algorithmic data like other playlist generators (it’s press release is titled “Look Ma, No Algorithms). (Update: Its curators are actually its users, who help fine-tune recommendations through the voting process, which the system then remembers and applies to future recommendations.) The company was purchased in 2008 by Amie Street, the variable pricing digital download service. It previously operated as a search engine and on-demand streaming service that relied on YouTube APIs to stream music, but stripped out the audio. That caused some problems after YouTube amended its technology to stop services from doing that. It also for a time used APIs provided by SeeqPod before industry lawsuits shut that company down. Switching to a customized, Internet radio model allows Songza to pay compulsory webcaster royalties rather than negotiate for on-demand licenses. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news Here’s the full release below: Songza.com released today the simplest way for people to create their own radio stations, for free. The new Songza.com gives users the ability to collaborate with friends, family, co-workers or even strangers to create the perfect shared station for any occasion, with a library of over 8,000,000 songs to choose from. “Much of the joy we get from music comes from how it connects us to the people around us,” said Elias Roman, CEO of Songza. “Songza is unique in making it easy for people to connect using shared, collaborative radio stations. We believe this makes for a far more social and relevant experience than radio based on ‘experts’ or algorithms analyzing tone and timbre.” Get weekly rundowns straight to your inbox Sign Up

If you turn on Songza while you're commuting, what I want is that your commute it going to be better. And if you turn on Songza when you go to the gym, I want your workout to be better. That's our product. Which I think is in stark contrast to every other service in our space, whether it's Pandora or Spotify, those are music companies. Their product is helping you search for and browse and organize and catalog music. That's what they do, because music is their product. We just see ourselves as something different. Continue Reading: Getting People Hooked on Songza> Getting People Hooked on Songza PCMag: Do you actually find that there is any competition between Songza and services like those, or because they are so different, you can exist on your own level? ER: Ultimately there is a limited number of listening hours in a day. That's where you have the most overlap — you can only be listening to so many things, and you're only going to listen to one thing at a time. But I think in terms of value that we offer and the experience of using the product, they're very, very different. PCMag: Have you been watching the music industry change online? Is there anything you're expecting to change in the next few years that you will have to adapt to? ER: With Songza, we fall under a statutory license, so in many ways, we're very much insulated a little bit more from the industry. The trends that we're looking at every day are more about mobile consumption. How are people interacting with their phones? How are people interacting with their tablets? How are tablets different than phones? What kind of activities are people doing with their devices? How do people transition from one type of device to another throughout the day? So those are really the trends that we're obsessed with. Much more so than music industry trends in general. We have 25 experts — freelancers — who are tastemakers in music. So more often than not, it's not looking at trends but it's saying, based on their expertise, what are the soundtracks, the vibes, that are going to make working in Excel better? And it turns out that epic film scores makes working in Excel better. Because The Last of the Mohicans soundtrack comes on, and all of a sudden you feel three-and-a-half times more significant than you did five seconds ago. PCMag: Tell me a little bit more about how those 25 experts work. ER: There's a two-way flow. Sometimes we'll reach out to them and say, "We just got a great request from our users," or say, "We just

Songza provides the spa treatment of music listening: Sit back, relax, and let the musical masseuse work its magic. The site, which launched in Sept. 2011, later activated its Web- and iOS-based Music Concierge service, which supplements the Songza experience by helping to tie music to users' lifestyle, be it playing video games or holding a weekday dance party. Just 10 days after the mobile app reached the iPad in June, Songza celebrated 1.15 million iOS downloads. By the summer, the service was officially available on the Internet, and for iOS and Kindle Fire devices, as well as select Android tech, with a playlist for almost any occasion. But Songza wasn't always the plan for its four co-founders, who stumbled upon the music service as a happy accident. From indie online music store/social network service Amie Street to international music lifestyle company, Elias Roman as well as co-founders Peter Asbill, Elliott Breece, and Eric Davich had a lot to celebrate in 2012. Roman recently chatted with PCMag about the evolution of his "lifestyle enhancement company," why he isn't afraid of Pandora, and the monster mascot's true identity. PCMag: How did Songza come to be? Elias Roman: It started with an accident. In February of 2006, my co-founders and I were sitting around a keg of Honey Brown. We were second-semester seniors in college; not a ton going on. We were having this philosophical discussion around what it would take for us to buy music. Was there any way we were going to stop stealing music, and if so, what would be required for that to happen? We ended up with this laundry list of features. It was feature after feature after feature [that] we felt would be required for us to ever stop pirating music. And by the time we were done with the series of discussions, it looked like we had a real thing there — a thing that we would respond to; a thing that our peers seemed to test well with. So that became our first business together — Amie Street. We were living on Amie Street at the time, so it wasn't super creatively named. Amazon was our first formal investor, and they actually ended up acquiring AmieStreet.com in 2010, but two years after we started that business, we found this huge shift in consumption. A short 24 months later, we were looking back at college kids and they were downloading music and wiping their hard drive and downloading again, or just starting to stream music, and it was like everything had changed. The concept of ownership didn't matter at all, as long as your music was there when you wanted it. We looked at that,

Interesting brand?" At Fashion Week, we partnered with Mercedes Benz. And in return, they sent a lot of users to the playlists, they shared them on Facebook, they asked people what songs they would add to the mixes. We've done that with Mercedes Benz, Victoria's Secret, Zappos, and Thrillist, and Radio Shack, and McCormack, and a handful of others. Another way: We've always done what we call benefit media. The theory there is [that] good business not only can mean doing good, but maybe has to mean doing good, too. What we always look for with the small marketing budgets we do have is how can we give this to a charity we care about, instead of to a search engine marketing platform? And the way that typically takes shape is, we'll do a donation-per-listener with a non-profit. Right now, we're doing something with Pencils for Promise and Free the Children, and basically we create these fun playlists that are branded, sort of DJed by the charity, they share it with their donors, and they ask, instead of taking out your wallet, listen to it and share it. For everyone you share it with, Songza's going to make a donation to us. PCMag: How many users do you have currently? ER: The last numbers we reported were 2 million in the U.S. and 1 million in Canada. At this point, both of those numbers are pretty outdated. We've grown nicely from there. We have millions of active users. PCMag: What is the most popular Songza platform among users? ER: It's been an interesting sort of see-saw. Before we had mobile apps, we had been iterating for a while on the Web. We had this user base of a decent number of testers for us. When we released mobile apps, they started at zero, then a lot of our users started using them, and very, very quickly, mobile became the No. 1 platform. Today, about 75 percent of the people who use Songza will use it via an app — a tablet or mobile phone app. Web, even though it's only 25 percent, has continued to grow really, really strongly. People use Songza on different platforms throughout the day. Really often, when we acquire a new Web user, we've effectively acquired a new mobile user, too, and vice versa. PCMag: What sort of feedback do you receive from users? ER: What's really nice is people express their experiences with Songza in terms of their lifestyle. We definitely get the "I just discovered an incredible new artist, song, or genre." But more often than that, we're hearing about some element of their day that is different and/or better because of Songza. And

Continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one accountShare your thoughts and join the conversation in the commentsEnjoy additional articles per monthGet email updates from your favourite authorsSign In or Create an AccountWe provide the right music at the right time so someone doesn’t have to do that workNew York City startup Songza Media Inc. started offering its free music streaming service online and through mobile apps in Canada on Aug. 7.Founder and chief executive Elias Roman describes the service as a “music concierge” that lets users pick the “right music at the right moment” by selecting playlists curated by music experts for every occasion from beating the Monday-morning blues, to working out, to romantic encounters.“We homed in on this idea that people don’t want to do any mental math when they’re trying to play music,” said Peter Asbil, his co-founder and chief operating officer. “We provide the right music at the right time so someone doesn’t have to do that work.”[np-related]Songza’s official launch was in September 2011 at Facebook’s annual developers conference f8 and the company counted more than two million active U.S. users in July. Songza handoutIt doesn’t yet have comparable user data for Canada, but in the two weeks following its expansion here, the Songza operating system for iPhone and iPad was downloaded 320,000 times.The company — which has eight full-time employees and counting in addition to about 25 independent music consultants who design the playlists — makes money primarily through display advertising.Get the