So Google bought Songza. That happened yesterday, or the day before, depending on which timezone you trust, since the news broke July 1st and by the time I saw it on my phone during lunch it had already made the rounds twice. My first reaction wasn't "interesting business move," it was closer to a small stomach drop, the kind you get when you find out the coffee shop you've been going to for three years just got bought by a chain.
I've been using Songza pretty much daily since sometime in 2013. Not for the app itself really, more for the front page, that grid of "Activity or Mood" tiles that just knows it's a Tuesday afternoon and you probably need something with fewer vocals and more bass. I've made fun of it to friends (who curates "Cleaning the Apartment," some 24 year old in Brooklyn with strong opinions about Hall & Oates?) but I've also just let it run for four hours straight while writing code and not touched a single button. Thats the whole pitch of the thing. Someone else does the picking.
Terms weren't disclosed, which is standard for these but always a little annoying when you're trying to gauge how big a deal it actually is. Some of the reporting is throwing around numbers in the low tens of millions, nothing confirmed. Compare that to what Apple's spending on Beats — that deal was $3 billion when it was announced back in May, and last I checked it still hadn't technically closed, still working through the regulatory stuff. Songza is obviously a much smaller thing by comparison, more of a talent-and-product acquisition than Apple buying a headphone company with a subscription service bolted on.
What I actually want to know, and what nobody's said yet, is whether the curation stays intact or whether this becomes ingredient parts for Google Play Music. Google's had All Access for a while now and its fine, its perfectly fine, but "fine" is not why I open Songza. I open Songza because I trust a human decided the running mix shouldn't have a slow song at minute 19. If Google turns that into an algorithm that guesses my mood from search history, I'm out, and I say that as someone who uses approximately six other Google products before 9am every day.
There's a pattern here if you've been paying attention the last couple years — one platform swallows a smaller, better-curated competitor, keeps the name around for a while as a coat of paint, and then quietly folds the actual functionality into the parent product until the original app just kind of stops existing. I'm not saying that's definitely what happens here. I'm saying I've seen this movie enough times that I'm not rushing to delete my other music apps just yet.
Unrelated tangent, but it's my blog so I get to have one: I had this playing in the background Tuesday night while I half-watched the US get knocked out of the World Cup by Belgium. Two goals in extra time, De Bruyne and Lukaku, and Tim Howard making about a thousand saves that ultimately didn't matter. Rough one to watch with a beer at 11pm on a work night. Good use of a "Focus" playlist though, oddly enough: turns out sports anxiety and coding anxiety respond to similar tempos.
Anyway. If you haven't used Songza and you're the kind of person who spends more time picking a Spotify playlist than actually listening to music, go try the mood grid before Google decides it needs an algorithm instead. It's the one app on my phone I never had a single complaint about, and I complain about apps constantly (ask anyone who's had to sit through me ranting about how the Gmail app still doesn't handle attachments right on Android). Some things just work, and it's always a little unsettling watching them get absorbed into something bigger, even when the something bigger has more money and better servers and, presumably, no plans to shut it down tomorrow.
We'll see. I give it eighteen months before something changes in a way I don't like. Hoping I'm wrong.