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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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...
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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:
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
