Songza
There are a lot of music streaming services out there on the internet, however there are only a few that are seriously successful. One of the reasons why Songza is unique to other music services and applications is that it is heavily focused on the social and crowdsourcing aspect of online music. The site itself has tons of curation for users’ own wants and desires, without just throwing vast databases of music at them. This is very similar to what Beats Music has been doing and is likely Google’s response to Apple’s buying Beats for $3 billion. Obviously, Google didn’t pay anywhere near $3 billion for Songza, but they surely did pay a fairly good price for a service with a user base in the millions.
Unfortunately, we don’t have exact figures for how many users Songza has, exactly. However we do know that as of 2012 they already had over 2 million users, which would logically put them somewhere near Beats Music’s user base, if not bigger. So, Google’s purchase of Songza may actually look better than Apple’s purchase of Beats, mainly because the primary justification for buying Beats was for Beats Music and the acquisition of Jimmy Iovine. I’m not entirely sure if Jimmy Iovine is worth a few billion dollars to have on your team, but the actual headphone business of Beats’ is actually more justifiable for $3 billion than the Beats Music service. Sure, a lot of people are saying good things about Beats Music, but it isn’t worth what Apple is paying.
So, if anything, Google’s purchase of Songza, while likely unnecessary appears very much to be a response to Apple’s overspending on Beats. Also, it will help with Google’s current batch of curated content which currently lacks the human touch that some of the social services like Songza bring. I honestly don’t get why these companies need to be acquired, but for some reason Apple and Google don’t think they can create a competitor to these services within their own existing framework without buying them.
