We have seen many surprising things in the tech world in the past few months, Lenovo bought Motorola, Apple takes Beat Audio in, but I would never though that one day I would report this. Today, Google announced that it’s acquiring the streaming-music service Songza. For those who do not know, Songza is streaming music service. Well, Google sees the advantage and has taken it to compete with Apple, Amazon, and to an extend, Microsoft.
The contextual playlist that Beats Music is currently offering to its users is actually from Songza when it’s just a web-based services, back in 2010. The company launched its first mobile app in 2011 and has grown up to 5.5 million active users ever since. Although the sum of the acquisition is undisclosed, sources that are close to the situation say that the price tag was $6.7 million to date, which is far less than what Apple paid for Beat Audio. Early reports from the New York Post suggested that the original offer was around $15 million.
In a lot of ways, this deal is particularly odd. Google’s current music service generated playlists based on user’s taste, while Songza offers simple hand-picked mixes that was shuffled by the service, like “Indie Music That’s Not Too Weird” and “Easy, Breezy, Summer Songs” that are created by real people and geared to match a person’s mood. With that idea, Songza is quite similar to Pandora and Beats. So, overall, what is value? Google explains:
“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.”
On the subject of Windows Phone, because Microsoft and Google never have a good relationship since the YouTube incident, Daniel Rubio, Editor-in-Chief of WP Central has reached out and ask about the future, like will Google kill it off or stop Windows PHone Service, the response was this:
@Daniel_Rubino stay positive, Daniel! we’re gonna keep making Songza better.
— peter asbill (@peterasbill) July 1, 2014
What do you think about the inquiry, tell me!
Source: Google Play
Fonetime.net 