Google Corporation: Buys Songza- A Music Streaming Service

No two days are same at Google. Google talked about some excellent products at Google 2014 I/O Conferance. And now, just one month after Apple Inc acquired Beats for $3 billion, Google acquired music streaming service Songza. Songza is  a New York based music streaming company with expertise in this business for almost 4 years.  The company has mastered in curating music playlists just like Beats Audio and this acquisition is viewed as a Google’s effort to jump into the fastest-growing segment of the music market business.

Songza Mascot

Songza was initially launched in November 8, 2007. Amie Street acquired Songza, a product created by Aza Raskin and Scott Robbin in October 2008. In August 2010, Amie Street was sold to Amazon . The Co-founders refocused their efforts on Songza. The team discontinued the original version and relaunched a new alpha version of Songza, keeping nothing of the original product but the name. Songza was launched in Canada on August 7, 2012 and reached the one million download mark just within 70 days. Starting October 2013, Songza inserted pop-up audio/video ads when initiating a playlist so it was no longer ‘audio-ad free’. It can be used for free with advertising but according to the sources, there are close to 5.5m active users who pay $0.99 a week for the ‘add-free’ premium service.

Songza creates "expert-curated" music playlists according to its huge database of information based on listening habits of users.  The mount of this deal is not clear so far; however, few sources say that Songza raised a total of just $6.7 million and the other reports on this acquisition from the New York Post said Google was offering around $15 million, while The New York Times claims the deal is worth over $39 million.