Spent most of yesterday afternoon half-watching the Germany-France match with one eye and rebuilding a Songza "cleaning the apartment" playlist with the other, and about halfway through folding a truly embarrassing pile of laundry it hit me: I should probably be worried about that app.
Google announced on Tuesday that it's buying Songza. Terms weren't disclosed, which is standard for these things, but the numbers floating around put Songza's monthly users somewhere north of 5 million, which honestly tracks with how often I see people mention it. The pitch, according to the post on the Google blog, is that Songza's mood and activity based playlists (their whole thing is you tell it what you're doing - "morning commute," "long run," "getting over a breakup" - and it hands you a playlist an actual human curated instead of an algorithm guessing) are getting folded into Google Play Music.
I want to like this. I do like this, actually, in the sense that Play Music has always felt like the app equivalent of a filing cabinet - technically it does the job, there's zero joy in it. Songza has actual personality. I've been using it since sometime last year, mostly for the "productive work" and "rainy day" playlists, and it's the rare recommendation engine that doesn't make me feel like I'm being sorted into a demographic bucket.
But here's my problem, and it's not really about Songza specifically, it's about Google specifically. This is a company that shut down Reader last year with about two months notice, after a decade of people building their actual daily reading habits around it. They've killed Wave, killed Buzz, and iGoogle's on its way out too. There's a whole graveyard site somebody made tracking all of this (don't have the link handy, it's out there, go look). So when I see "Google acquires beloved small app with passionate user base," my first reaction isn't excitement, it's a low grade dread. Give it eighteen months and either it gets absorbed into Play Music until the parts that made it good are sanded off, or it just quietly stops existing one Tuesday with a blog post nobody reads.
Maybe that's unfair. Play Music integration could genuinely mean Songza's curation team gets more resources and reach instead of less. Spotify and Beats Music are both circling this same space (the Beats acquisition is apparently still working its way through regulators), so it makes sense Google wants a curation story that isn't "here is every song ever, good luck." I don't actually think this is some cynical acquire-and-kill move. I think they want the product. I'm just gun shy at this point, is all.
Small tangent since I'm already here: does anyone else find it a little funny that "playlist for a specific mood" is basically a solved problem now, and yet none of these apps can agree on a UI for browsing by mood that doesn't involve endless scrolling past a wall of colored tiles? Songza's grid of activities is fine, better than most, but I still end up typing into the search box half the time because scrolling past "Cooking Dinner" and "Booty Call" (that's a real category, I've seen it) to find whatever specific thing I'm actually doing takes longer than just typing it.
Anyway. World Cup quarterfinals wrap up with Argentina-Belgium later today, and I noticed Twitter was bragging a couple weeks back about setting some new record for tweets-per-second during one of the group stage matches - I want to say it was during a Netherlands game, somewhere in the neighborhood of 580,000 tweets in a single minute, which is a genuinely wild number to think about once you remember most of those tweets are just people typing "GOOOOOL" with a variable number of Os. Not really connected to the Songza thing, just been eating my whole July, this tournament.
I'll check back in on the Play Music integration once it's actually live and report on whether the mood playlists survive the move or get quietly homogenized into the same six generic "Chill Vibes" categories every other service already has. Not optimistic. Would genuinely like to be wrong here.