Follow the Beats: Google Buys Songza

A few weeks ago, we’d heard that Google was mulling the purchase of a music streaming company, seemingly following in the footsteps of Apple, which recently dropped $3 billion to buy Beats Music (and, more specifically, to buy the employment of Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine). Today, it seems that Google has pulled the trigger on Songza, a streaming music service that relies on curated playlists matched with genres, moods, and times of day to give tunes to listeners.

It isn’t clear right now how much the acquisition cost Google, but a post on TechCrunch reports that it’s likely the price was higher than $15 million, due to interest from other potential buyers driving the final cost up. According to Google, Songza will be contributing to the company’s musical endeavors going forward, hopefully making Google Play Music a more enticing service to users, and possibly even working closely with the new YouTube music streaming service that we’ve heard about in recent months:

“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. We’ll also look for opportunities to bring their great work to the music experience on YouTube and other Google products.”

Songza had this to say about their new corporate overlords:

“Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’re becoming part of Google. We can’t think of a better company to join in our quest to provide the perfect soundtrack for everything you do. No immediate changes to Songza are planned, other than making it faster, smarter, and even more fun to use.”

As great a service as Songza is, they don’t have quite the cachet that Beats had. On the other hand, Beats had a notoriously low subscriber count prior to its acquisition by Apple, and was mostly bought for the personnel that came with it. Songza, on the other hand, provides more data points for Google to build out its various services, which is exactly what they do best. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next now that these two have joined forces.